Daniel Chen

In the Heavy Oil team, I was tasked with finding capital-efficient production in a mature asset base.

I built a capital screening model that evaluated 50 recompletion and reactivation candidates against NPV, payout, and reservoir-risk hurdles. The model gave the team a defensible list of options and my recommendations went on to direct development capital and add value to the asset.

I led the Lone Rock Polymer Flood expansion evaluation with a multidisciplinary team of reservoir, facilities, and operations engineers. The economics did not clear the hurdle rate. I recommended deferral, and the proposed capital was held back from a project that would have destroyed value.

At Senlac I led an acid stimulation pilot with field operations and Challenger Technical Services. Hall plot analysis let me isolate which wells were plugged near the wellbore, and I sized the acid volumes to match, restoring production.

I also trained and deployed a computer vision model that reads satellite imagery to detect storage tanks at inactive well sites. It replaced a manual review of the field's site inventory with a pipeline that runs in seconds.

Before moving into the Calgary office I spent a summer in the field operating 7 light oil well pads. I set daily production priorities with the operations team and led hazard assessments with contractors before every well-site job.

CNRL had acquired well pads in the 2024 Chevron transaction, and I brought them onto CNRL operating standards, walking the sites to verify P&IDs against what was actually in the ground and processing AFE revisions across the acquired footprint.

Brumar designs the mechanical and plumbing systems inside commercial buildings. I produced drawings that were built across 30 commercial developments for clients including Orlando, Menkes, and CBRE.

I ran heating and cooling load calculations, infiltration assessments, and gas pipe sizing to ASHRAE standards. I also advised clients on HVAC equipment selection, where right-sizing equipment to the actual load cut their capital cost on the mechanical package.

My first internship was in building sustainability. I audited commercial buildings managed by GWL Realty Advisors against their carbon emission targets, working from utility data and site information to see where each property stood.

I built load and greenhouse gas models in Excel to quantify energy use and emissions, then compared the results to target.

In 2024 the AEAC Student UAS Competition set an urban air mobility problem. Build an aircraft that can carry passengers across a city with nobody flying it. Scoring came in two phases: a design report, a pitch, and a realism review first, then flight tasks at Alma Airport in Quebec covering distance, endurance, and a precision landing.

Our aircraft was Night Fury. A 3-metre carbon-composite eVTOL with a fixed wing, sized around a four-passenger cabin. It took off vertically, transitioned to forward flight, followed waypoints on its own, found its landing pad by camera, and built a map of its surroundings as it flew using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

I sat on the aerodynamics side with three other students. My design iteration ran through three tools. I shaped the fuselage in OpenVSP, pushed the geometry into a Python optimizer the team had written to spit out airfoil dimensions, then checked what the new airfoil did to drag and went back to OpenVSP. Once the shape held, I rebuilt it in SolidWorks so the BOM could be tracked off the model.

Night Fury won Prototype Realism and finished second in Pitch Presentation at nationals.

The 2025 AEAC competition took place in Medicine Hat, AB where the scope was wildfire hotspot detection, flying a search pattern and mapping heat signatures from an onboard camera.

This task required an aircraft with high endurance flying at low speeds. I redesigned the airframe as a blended wing, with the fuselage faired into the wing as a single lifting surface. This made the aircraft more stable in slow flight, and it freed up enough volume inside to fit twice the battery capacity.

Stingray was the first blended-wing aircraft in QADT history.

Design Project Scope: Design a gearbox for a small race car that had to compete in two events with one drivetrain. A timed sprint and a hill climb with a 3.75 kg mass strapped to the back.

Working in a team of 5, we approached it with a shifting gearbox to best approach each event individually.

I took responsibilities for the shafts. The design spec required five years of continuous running, which makes fatigue the failure mode. I started from the textbook endurance limit for AISI 4130 and found the stress each diameter could carry indefinitely.

Then I loaded the shafts. I assumed gear forces and bearing reactions in hill-climb mode, since that case is heavier. Writing singularity functions integrated into shear, moment, and torque diagrams along each shaft. I ran the DE-Gerber criterion at each of those points to get a factor of safety.

The input shaft came out at 2.77. The intermediate shaft at 1.22. The output shaft at 1.03.

Project Scope: Design the material lattice shape for a heel insert that would sell across sports shoes. The reference was the pod in the Adidas Copa Sense cleat. Two oval pods that sit at the back.

The design challenge was building the best pattern within a 30 mm test cube. Working in a team of 5, we built five patterns in SolidWorks, with square, circular, hexagonal, and triangular cutouts, and scored each one on strength, comfort, and shock absorption in a weighted matrix. My triangular truss came out on top. It had 76% porosity, more than any other option, the lowest simulated mass, and a peak dynamic stress of 0.3 MPa against a 2 MPa limit. Each triangle is stiff on its own, so the pattern could remove a lot of material without going soft.

We printed the cube in TPU and put it through static and drop tests. At 50 N it deflected 3.58 mm, which works out to 12.2 N/mm. Softer than we had planned, but for something under a heel that is the right direction. In the drop test a mass with an accelerometer came down from 50 mm. The cube compressed 11 mm and the mass rebounded 9.5 mm, so the lattice took the hit and came back. The print weighed 6.32 g.

In the in-class competition it won first prize for applied force per gram.

I officially launched Birchcove Industries in May 2026 to help my friends and neighbours implement AI automation into their business operations. The clients are trades and construction businesses: roofers, plumbers, HVAC contractors. Owners who are good at the work and buried in the paperwork.

A popular workflow I built was automating profit reporting via automatic invoice processing. Invoices sent and received by email get read by a language model, categorized, and rolled into a monthly profit report by job category. No one has to key anything in. The second product is a single owner dashboard that pulls job costing, scheduling, and profitability into one screen.

The business model won a City of Toronto Summer Company Grant. The invoice system ran in a 3.5-month pilot with a roofing contractor.

On a bored day in first year university, I decided I wanted to learn how to make money through e-commerce.

In May 2024, I launched my first product: a luxury watch-display case, on the basis of (product category monthly revenue / number of major competitors) > $8,000 per competitor, and personal interest in the product. Supplier packaging failures damaged units in transit and sank reviews. The effort on premium marketing images did not meet my expectations on demand turnout. I closed the listing in November 2024 with a -$2,000 USD loss.

I launched my second product in January 2026: a plant-irrigation mat for dry-heat US markets, on the basis of an untapped market with zero established players and a necessity for the product rather than self-interest. I paid a premium for warehousing in California and Arizona to position inventory closer to demand. Five months after my first full shipment arrived, I had 550+ units sold and $10K USD revenue at a 43% net margin, with zero paid advertising.

I have always been fascinated in how value is created in companies. To gain exposure, I manage a diversified equity portfolio through a fundamental, thesis-driven investment approach. I follow companies and industries that interest me, research their underlying business fundamentals and current valuation, and assess whether industry dynamics can support future growth. I invest when I believe the potential upside is asymmetric relative to the downside and the position complements the broader portfolio. Since 2022, my portfolio has generated a 31% weighted-average annualized return.