Damon Skappel

Computer Science, Business & Data Science triple-major at Concordia College. Currently an IT Intern at Marvin Windows and an undergraduate robotics researcher benchmarking imitation-learning policies on a real dual-arm robot.

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 on Lake of the Woods.

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.