Students At Work

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) is the national body in Canada that strategically invests in the country’s scientific and technological capabilities. To stimulate student interest in research in the natural sciences and engineering, and to encourage graduate studies and research careers, NSERC offers Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA).

Elena Pricoiu, now entering her last year as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, won one of these awards to work at Rocscience this past summer.

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Elena mainly worked on the development of RocProp, a Windows database program for accessing and presenting records of rock properties in an intuitive manner. Among other things, she added the capability to input triaxial data into RocProp to store hundreds of tests provided by Evert Hoek. She also worked on RocData, a Windows program used to determine the parameters of linear and non-linear strength envelopes for rock and soil, based on the analysis of triaxial or direct shear strength data.

She gained first hand experience of the product development procedures companies such as Rocscience use to develop software that meets the wide-ranging needs of users.

Elena has returned to the University of Toronto to complete her bachelor's degree in computer engineering. She takes with her valuable experience about how commercial products are developed and marketed.