Damon Skappel

Computer Science, Business & Data Science triple-major at Concordia College. Currently an IT Intern at Marvin Windows and an undergraduate robotics machine learning researcher using vison language action (VLA) models on a S0-101 robotic arm

Portrait of Damon Skappel.

About

Background

I'm a Computer Science, Business, and Data Science triple-major at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, with a concentration in Cybersecurity Operations. I grew up in Warroad, MN, and discovered programming through tinkering with small games before moving into web development, enterprise software, and, most recently, machine learning on real hardware.

At Marvin Windows I work with the digital team on Salesforce Cloud, writing Apex and Lightning components. Through Concordia I'm running a comparative study of imitation-learning policies on a real dual-arm robot. Outside of work I build games and websites in Java, JavaScript, and Python; pursue security certifications; and spend time with friends, playing hockey, and fishing.

Currently

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Summer 2026

Concordia College · Moorhead, MN

Comparative study of imitation-learning policies (Action Chunking Transformer vs. the 450M-parameter SmolVLA) on a real dual-arm SO-101 robot. Built the full pipeline end-to-end on Hugging Face's LeRobot framework — hardware assembly, teleop dataset collection (200 episodes, ~71k frames), training, and autonomous deployment.

IT Intern

May 2025 — Present

Marvin Windows · Warroad, MN

Write Apex code for digital team initiatives and build Lightning components customizing Salesforce Cloud applications. Collaborate cross-functionally to translate business requirements into shipped internal tools.

Toolkit

Skills

Languages

  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • Apex
  • SQL / SOQL
  • HTML & CSS
  • PHP

Salesforce

  • Apex
  • Lightning Components
  • Salesforce Cloud
  • Developer Console

ML / data

  • PyTorch
  • Hugging Face
  • CUDA
  • Weights & Biases
  • Tableau

Tools & focus

  • Git, VS Code, IntelliJ
  • Full-stack web
  • ML & robotics
  • Cybersecurity

Get in touch

Open to internships and collaboration

If you're a recruiter, engineering manager, or fellow student with something interesting to build, I'd love to hear from you.