Amy Steiner returned home to a devastated Alaska economy in 2016 after finishing graduate school at Delft University of Technology in the

Netherlands. The geotechnical engineering job in Fairbanks she was promised fell through, so she spent six months substitute teaching and shelling out resumes for any opening she could find.

When PND Engineers, Inc. invited her to interview, Amy was eager to make an impression and secure a job after months of disappointment. Maybe too eager.

“I thought she was nuts,” said PND Principal Engineer Torsten Mayrberger, PE, PhD, and head of the company’s geotechnical engineering department. “She was the worst interviewer ever.”

Jokes aside, “She’s got a ton of personality,” he said. “It was obvious she’s smart. She was just so, so nervous.”

Despite the nerves, Torsten realized Amy had figured out something most people take a lifetime to discover: herself. After seeing her rare authenticity, Torsten knew she was the right person for the job.

Amy has since settled into her senior geotechnical engineer position and proven to be the integral employee PND imagined when the firm hired her in January 2017.

Amy Steiner:pnd’s ‘invaluable’ geotechnical commodity

PND Senior Engineer Amy Steiner, PE, installs a BeadedStream Standard Digital Temperature Cable and satellite data logger to monitor ground temperatures on the North Slope of Alaska.

by stephanie hernandez mcgavinpnd proposals coordinator

Alaska is HomeAmy knew she wanted to be a geotechnical engineer

early in her undergraduate studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF).

“Once it came to my attention that you can, in fact, play with dirt for a living and call it engineering – that had a lot of appeal,” Amy said.

She ended up doing utility design in Fairbanks after she graduated from UAF in 2012. After seeing the innards of every sewer main and manhole from Fort Wainwright to

North Pole, Amy decided it was time to pursue her master’s degree.

Amy and her husband, Everet Megli, who were dating at the time, wanted to adventure outside of Alaska. They landed in South Holland, where

Amy attended Delft University of Technology and earned a master’s degree in civil engineering with a geotechnical emphasis.

The couple hadn’t been to Europe before. They showed up with everything they owned stuffed into six duffel bags and navigated their first metro ride to get to an apartment they had never seen in person. It was, as Amy described it, an “astronomical culture shock.” The crowded city was a far cry from Fairbanks.

“I grew up in Fairbanks, did my bachelor’s degree in Fairbanks, and I was working in Fairbanks,” Amy said. “And then we moved to the Netherlands, sight unseen, to go to school. And the Netherlands is a fabulous country and the people are incredibly nice, but it is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe.”

Once the initial shock wore off, Amy loved it. The couple now pops into Delft every other year before their biennial rock-climbing trip in Kalymnos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Still, Amy always knew she’d return to Alaska, where the adventures are limitless.

“Alaska is home in a way that nowhere else will ever be,” she said.

Amy didn’t expect to return home to a recession and a job as a math and science substitute teacher. When the PND job came to fruition, she was ready to get to work.Undaunted, Unstoppable

Amy proved early on she is as tough as they come. It’s an unadvertised prerequisite for a job that can last weeks on Alaska’s North Slope, where Amy is often one of very few women.

“She’s a spitfire, and she made me laugh right off the bat,” said PND colleague Sean Sjostedt, a geotechnical engineer in the Juneau office.

“She’s a bear in the field,” he said. “Drillers are known for being rough and unfiltered, and Amy can be right up there with them. She puts them in their place.”

Amy, who studied for her PE exam while working the nightshift in a remote mobile camp on the Slope, is nonchalant about how she handles it all.

“It’s definitely interesting because I have always been the only girl on the crew,” she said. “I think at some point there’s a combination of, ‘Anything you can do, I can also do’ attitude, followed closely by a ‘You can’t stop me.’”

It’s an attitude Amy was forced to adhere to since an early age. She was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was four years old. Instead of being overwhelmed by the disease, Amy became an advocate for diabetes education. She will happily show you her glucose sensor, the part of her commercial loop that tells her insulin pump when to adjust insulin dosing. In addition to moderating a support group for people with diabetes, Amy co-hosts a podcast about living with diabetes called “The Diacast” (www.diacast.com).

“The goal is to dispel some of the myths about living with diabetes and do what we can to educate and help people feel like they’re not alone in this,” Amy said of the podcast.

While living with diabetes is the only normal she’s known, Amy can’t discount the disease at work, especially since her insulin sensitivity is heightened in the field.

Amy and Everet at the airport before liftoff to the Netherlands. At this moment, the couple was experiencing a “massive existential crisis,” only to face some “astronomical culture shock” upon landing and settling into their new temporary home in South Holland.

A shot of Amy climbing in Cayman Brac, the easternmost island of the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean Sea.

“Once it came to my attention that you can, in fact, play

with dirt for a living and call it engineering – that had a lot of appeal.” - Amy Steiner

As a precaution, she teaches the drillers she works with how to administer glucagon, the medicine used to raise blood sugar when it becomes dangerously low.

Otherwise, her strategy is simple: She always tells her crew, “If you think I’m acting weird, ask me what my blood sugar is.”

Torsten recalled Amy toughing it out on one particular trip to the North Slope last winter. She was working on two separate projects – one for Hilcorp, one for ConocoPhillips – each with a project site on either side of the Alpine Ice Bridge and Kuparuk Low-Water Crossings.

The Alpine Ice Bridge was nearing its seasonal closure, while the PND-designed Kuparuk bridges close temporarily around the same time when ice floes overtop them during spring breakup. The team traveled back and forth across the bridges to each site numerous times while pressed against Mother Nature’s unpredictable deadline.

Amy was “amazing,” Torsten said. In the rush to complete the work on both large-scale projects, she also coordinated logistics and ensured driller trucks and equipment were going where they needed to go. She even jumped in to help drill. In total, she spent six weeks on the Slope.

“It’s hard to break Amy,” Torsten said. “I’ve not seen her broken yet, and she’s been out in the field for long periods of time.”On-the-Job Adventuring

While Alaska gives Amy nonstop access to the mountains for hiking and running, PND gives her the opportunity to adventure on the clock. By virtue of doing geotechnical work, and doing it in Alaska, Amy takes part in exciting jobs in remote parts of the state most people will never see. Oftentimes, she’s figuring out solutions to problems nobody else has encountered.

It’s not always glamourous, but it’s always fun.“The geotech group does a lot of really unusual things,

and it’s small enough that you do a lot of everything, so you don’t get pigeonholed,” Amy said. “And a lot of what we do is unusual, so you have to figure out how to do it because

there isn’t literature or somebody hasn’t done it before – we’re the first people to do it. You have to figure it out, and it has to be right.”

She brought up an example of her recent work on the Seward Gateway Hotel project in 2019, where the underlying soil on the proposed hotel site was found to be potentially liquefiable. PND’s geotechnical team needed to think creatively to design a ground improvement program using only materials the contractor had available. The team stabilized the foundation soils with vibro-compaction. They used a vibrating probe to advance 358 probes 40 feet into the ground to tighten soil particles and increase soil density to withstand seismic activity. The engineers then used cone penetration testing to measure the ground improvement post vibro-compaction.

Coming up with innovative solutions is not uncommon for PND’s geotechnical team, and ingenuity is one of Amy’s specialties.

“She’s very, very smart,” Sean said. “If I have a pretty technical question, I go to her hands down. She’s an intelligent person and she’s very tenacious. If she doesn’t know the answer, she has no issue tracking down the solution.”

Amy’s next adventure is gearing up to lead PND’s geotechnical team on the Ambler Road access project. The job is a massive undertaking: Her team will provide geotechnical engineering services to construct a 211-mile gravel access road linking the Dalton Highway to the Ambler Mining District through the Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve. It’s nothing she can’t handle.

“She’s invaluable,” Torsten said. “You can throw her into pretty much any situation and I don’t have to worry about her. She’s very adept. You don’t find people like that very often.”

Tough, authentic, intelligent – Amy is a rarity indeed. But we didn’t need to prove that to you. She doesn’t care what you think; she’s got a job to do.

Want to work with Amy? Join our geotech squad today at

pndengineers.com/careers.

Amy climbing in Kaylmnos, Greece.

Amy with friend and colleague Tom DePeter, owner of Onyx Drilling, posing in the field.