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Special Panel: Week 2

Week 2

Alumni Panel

One of our great COSMOS traditions is our Alumni Panel! Our panelists are alumni from all of the different COSMOS campuses: UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego. Some are now industry professionals, UC students, recent graduates, COSMOS Cluster Assistants and even COSMOS Co-Instructors. This is a great opportunity for current COSMOS students to ask questions about how COSMOS influenced the panelists lives and to even network with the panelists. Below are short bios and headshots from each of our panelists.

Alumni Panel will be hosted via Zoom on Thursday, July 20th at 9am. Students will view the Zoom in their classrooms.

Nick Gravish

Dr. Gravish's research focuses on applying the principles of biological systems towards the design and control of mobile robots. He is passionate about mechanical design and system dynamics, and he enjoys working at the intersection of these areas with biological locomotion research. The current research in his lab is focused on three core areas: 1) development of novel fabrication methods for bio-inspired mobile robots at small and large scales, 2) translating principles of biological legged locomotion to legged robot design and control, 3) development of bio-inspired energy efficient flapping wing robots.

Veronica Tang

Veronica is currently a cryptography researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Security and Privacy, but she starts as a privacy engineer at Google in October. She graduated in 2022 from Harvard University with a degree in Computer Science and English. For her thesis, she proposed a new framework for understanding privacy through the lens of literary authorship and examined the role of speculative fiction in reevaluating appropriate privacy thresholds with respect to our social norms and contextual privacy. She is also the co-founder of a nonprofit organization, All Girls STEM Society, as well as a dancer, published creative writer, and enthusiast of all things folk and myth.

Daniel Ji

Daniel is a rising sophomore at UCSD studying Computer Science with a minor in Design. He was in Cluster 11 (Feedback Control with Applications to Robotics) at UCSC in 2021 and at the time part of the programming division of his school's FTC robotics team. In high school, he also had an interest in cybersecurity and was part of his school's CyberPatriot team. Now at UCSD, Daniel is an undergraduate bioinformatics researcher and works on developing web apps for a variety of different purposes, ranging from genetic sequence data visualization to porting genomics tools to the web. He also works as a student developer for UCSD's ITS department, building web apps for staff and students.

Quinn Campbell

Quinn is a rising senior at Canyon Crest Academy. She attended COSMOS in 2022 for Cluster 3 and this summer she is a Cluster 3 assistant. In addition to the analytical lab work carried out by all the participants, she led a small group in a project involving desalination during her time at COSMOS. This past school year, she's spent lots of time in one of the analytical chemistry labs at UCSD working with George Anderson, who is a co-instructor in Cluster 3 this summer. The analytical work culminated in co-authoring a paper titled, “Comparison of the Fajans and Mohr Techniques for the Titration of Chloride Ions” which is currently in the review process. Her current interests are in biochemistry and global health.

Ella Nghiem

Ella Nghiem attended Cluster 6, Biodiesel from Renewable Sources, in 2019 at UCSD. Some of her favorite memories include: turning canola oil into biodegradable flip flop foam and testing their densities with her project group; choreographing for CosmoOlympics; watching the sunset at Gliderport cliff.

She is currently a rising third-year majoring in biomedical sciences and minoring in chemistry and dance at Marquette University. Afterwards, she will continue in the direct-entry 7-year dentistry program graduating with a DDS in 2028. As an RA for the transfer living-learning community, Ella enjoys helping underclassmen navigate the difficult transition into college, advocating for mental health awareness, and hosting fun floor events! In her spare time, she enjoys playing the flute and piano, hitting the beach, trying new plant-based foods, and exploring the Pacific Northwest with her friends.

Zayra Lobo

Zayra was part of the 2012 UC Irvine COSMOS Cohort in Cluster 5, where she led her team in a project about convolution reverb, and in high school she discovered her passion for robotics and embedded systems while on her school’s FIRST Robotics team (go 2367!).

After high school, she went on to study Engineering at Harvey Mudd College, where she was part of an underwater robotics lab that used its robots to perform shipwreck mapping and shark tracking. In an effort to further pursue her love of embedded systems after getting her B.S. in Engineering, Zayra worked for a year in Intel’s Internet of Things Group, got her M.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in robotics from Georgia Tech, and interned at Tesla and Apple on their hardware integration and sensor calibration teams respectively. In June 2021, she started her current job at Cruise, an autonomous car company in San Francisco, where she works as an Embedded Software Engineer on interfacing cameras with the vehicle’s autonomy stack.

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