Meet our SIMULIA Champion John Vandeventer. He is an Associate Technical Fellow in the Boeing Commercial Airplanes Structures Engineering Design and Analysis Solutions team. Vandeventer has worked at Boeing for 31 years, using Dassault Systèmes software the whole time, beginning with CATIA Elfini Versions 3 and 4, CATIA Version 5, Abaqus, and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

Vandeventer’s interest in engineering goes back to his childhood.

“I always liked building things,” he says. “I look back at pictures my parents took of me, and I had built these structures out of plastic straws and plastic connectors. When I looked back at them after I had become an engineer, I realized I had been building finite element models.”

In his free time, Vandeventer spends a great deal of time outdoors. He owns some land east of Seattle, where he works to clean up the forests, keeping them healthy and preventing the kinds of wildfires that have so severely affected the Pacific Northwest this year.

“I would call it industrial scale gardening,” he says. “I get fresh air, I get lots of exercise and I get to see a lot of wildlife.”

In November, Vandeventer will deliver the keynote address at the Global 3DEXPERIENCE Modeling & Simulation Conference. Learn more about this year’s virtual event and register here.

We will be getting to know some of our individual SIMULIA Champion a series of blogs, finding out more about their history – and future – with the technology. Read the full interview with Vandeventer on the SIMULIA Blog.

https://blogs.3ds.com/simulia/meet-simulia-champion-john-vandeventer/