Rethink, Refresh,
Rebuild.

Kitty Yeung is a hardware engineer with a PhD in Applied Physics, who is interested in technology and making consumer products that can integrate science, art and music in order to make intellectual contributions to broader society.

Rob Ryan-Silva has more than 25 years of experience working on aid projects in some of the world’s most challenging environments. As Director of DAI’s Maker Lab, he builds hardware, and capacities to build hardware, in support of international development projects around the world.

Amy Qian is a mechanical engineer, product design engineer, and maker who delights in hands-on learning and teaching. Favorite recent non-work projects include house electrification, garden planter boxes with drip irrigation, and a ventilation system for a stealth car camper.

Lara is a designer, educator, and fabricator whose work lies at the intersection of craft and technology, often including custom interfaces and e-textiles. She's an advocate for skill-sharing, accessibility, and efforts created and supported by the community. She has taught and worked at a variety of places including Instructables.com, NIME, and California College of Arts. She is one of four co-organizers of eTextile Spring Break.

Sirina graduated UC Riverside with a B.S. in Electrical Engineer in 2017. Today Sirina works as a Systems Engineer for the Deep Space Network (DSN) which enables mission who visit the moon and beyond to communicate with earth. In her role Sirina translates project data needs into software architecture through the DSN. She enjoys working with other NASA centers, foreign space agencies, and Universities who build these spacecrafts. Sirina is an advocate for promoting space exploration through outreach and social events. In her free time, she enjoys camping, hiking and cooking.

Ezgi is the CTO at LOOMIA, a leading smart textiles and technology company based in Los Angeles, where she oversees the refinement of innovative ideas into scalable manufacturing processes. Her work in multi-sensory explorations and materials research has been featured around the world at exhibits such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Circuit Bridges Concert Series, SXSW, and Numa Paris.

Sarah is a systems engineer in Northrop Grumman’s Space Systems division with experience developing system architecture models for satellite defense programs. She has an interdisciplinary background in political science, environmental science, math, and systems engineering. Hobbies include creating analytical hierarchy trade studies and sneaking vegetables into her nephews’ diet.

Sophy Wong is a designer and maker exploring the new frontier of wearable electronics. Using digital fabrication techniques like 3D printing and laser cutting, her work highlights the intersection of technology and design for the human body. Sophy has written numerous tutorials based on her work for HackSpace Magazine, and other maker publications. She has been featured by Hackaday, Make: Magazine, Adam Savage's Tested.com, and Adafruit. Sophy documents her work at SophyWong.com and on her YouTube channel. Her book, Wearable Tech Projects, is a compilation of 30 tutorials and articles about DIY wearable tech.

James has worked as an Applications Engineer, Microcontroller Firmware Developer, Product Support and Development Manager for a number of products and companies. He excels at troubleshooting complex systems and providing support to users of all experience levels.

Janelle Wellons graduated with her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an instrument operations systems engineer. Her job consists of planning, generating, and validating the commands to operate and monitor the health and safety of scientific instruments in-flight on missions such as the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols, Sentinel-6, SWOT, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and previously the Cassini mission.

Robbie Nock is the Director of Entrepreneurship and Professional Practice at ArtCenter College of Design. His background spans media production, new technology and startup development. At ArtCenter, Robbie produces academic programs and provides strategic services for a global community of creatives, entrepreneurs, educators and investors.

Helen is a creative technologist and author who specializes in music technologies and experimental electronics. She is the author of "The Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics", as well as a regular hardware column for Make Magazine. Helen is Head of Community at Crowd Supply, a crowdfunding platform for open hardware.

Andy is an inclusive design engineer at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center (RLANRC) with over 25 years of experience of designing, creating and customizing technology for individuals with disabilities. He is the founder and director of the Emerging Tech Lab at RLANRC, which focuses on the research and application of new and emerging technologies (e.g. 3d printing, AR/VR, wearables) for rehabilitation and independent living. Andy developed and launched an innovative course in assistive device design at Caltech, which for several terms teamed engineering and ArtCenter product design students through support from Designmatters.

Shah Selbe is the founder of Conservify and a National Geographic Explorer and Fellow. He is an engineer and conservation technologist that works with communities, NGOs, and developing countries to identify and deploy technologies that can help with their greatest conservation challenges. His projects have integrated crowdsourcing, smartphone apps, drones, satellite data, and sensors to address such conservation issues as illegal poaching and the monitoring of protected areas.

Jacob has worked on the engineering teams of a number of hardware startups before joining Conservify in early 2017. At Conservify Jacob has done field and lab work that require applying and gaining knowledge to solve engineering problems of all kinds in a variety of exotic places, each with their own unique challenges. In his free time Jacob, has a voracious appetite for maker culture. He contributes to local Makerspaces and mentors his friends in software, as well as evangelizes the benefits of hand tool woodworking and traditional methods, one of his favorite hobbies.

Leah is a mechanical engineer, embedded systems enthusiast, maker, coder, and artist. She has worked on engineering projects in cleantech, robotics, and currently health tech. Her favorite hacker projects involve puppet robots. Before retraining as an engineer, she was a diplomat at the US Department of State where she served in Tanzania, Bolivia, and Washington DC.