Michael's robotics story started in middle school on the Local Legends First LEGO League team with fellow Esperero Canyon students Jeremy Wang and Josh Tint, coached by Charlotte Ackerman. Today he is a Robotics Engineer at Workr in the San Francisco Bay Area, bringing AI-driven perception and motion planning to industrial robotic arms. He earned his master's in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at Arizona State University, where his thesis produced a fully autonomous robotic manipulation system for high-risk, space-constrained environments. He also won first place and a $1,000 prize in the DREAM (Design, Robotics, Engineering, Art and Motion) Competition, and his research has included glovebox robotics and rehabilitation devices. He has never stopped giving back: he mentors young students in STEM and served as a Pioneer Robotics mentor during the 2025 season.

Jeremy was an original member of the Local Legends First LEGO League team at Esperero Canyon Middle School, alongside Michael Gross and Josh Tint. At CFHS, he saw that students lacked a strong path to keep building engineering skills after middle school, so he helped found the Robotics Club and served as its president. He also competed in Science Olympiad, served two years as choir treasurer, and co-founded the Sea Shanty Club as its First Mate, which drew 80 students at its peak. When COVID-19 hit during his senior year, he founded and led the Tucson chapter of Masks for Docs, 3D printing face shields for doctors and designing an award-winning modular mask for the public.

At Johns Hopkins University, Jeremy earned a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering in 2026 as a Hodson Scholarship recipient. He logged more than 800 hours of immunotherapy and protein engineering research in the Spangler Lab, conducted research in the Gray Lab, and served as a teaching assistant in structural biology and introductory biomedical engineering. On the BME Design Team, he was business and structural design lead for NeoHydrate, a point-of-care monitoring device for newborns. He also built a website from scratch for a neurotech startup incubator and sang with the AllNighters a cappella group. After two years of full-time volunteer service leading teams in four California cities, he returned to Hopkins with renewed drive to fight cancer, the disease that shaped his path.

Nik earned a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering at the University of Arizona, where he researched algal growth and pH dynamics under Dr. Kim Ogden as part of a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project and served as a teaching assistant for Transport Phenomena. Today he is a Technical Services Engineer at Epic in Verona, Wisconsin. He has stayed close to his FIRST roots: CFSD thanked him for leading the organization of its December 2025 FIRST LEGO League tournament, where Pioneer members served as emcees and mentors, and he has mentored a younger student in his scholarship group.

Josh's path in tech began on the Local Legends First LEGO League team at Esperero Canyon Middle School, alongside Michael Gross and Jeremy Wang. At the start of high school, he taught himself to code and designed an algorithm to dissect and build poems, then used it to enter the school poetry contest and won. He was one of 19 Arizona students chosen for the 2021 Flinn Scholarship from nearly 1,000 applicants.

At Arizona State University, where he focused on linguistics, Josh built Discover Me, an app that gives people a safe, low-pressure way to explore questions of identity. It made him one of three Swift Student Challenge featured winners in Apple's Newsroom. The honor included meeting Apple CEO Tim Cook, who demoed the app himself. Today he is a doctoral student in computational linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, studying how AI language models communicate and whether they treat all users fairly. He has already published as lead author at a NeurIPS workshop and at NAACL 2025.

Delaney is a biomedical and chemical engineer at BioMARC in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she helps keep more than 1,500 pieces of biopharmaceutical manufacturing equipment calibrated, qualified, and ready to run. Her work includes validating an automated vial thaw system and a remote temperature monitoring system. At Colorado State University, her senior design team built a sterile, single-use containment system for the UV illumination stage of a personalized cancer immunotherapy, work aimed at moving the treatment from centralized labs into hospitals.

Noah earned the 2022 Flinn Scholarship, awarded to 20 students from more than 1,000 applicants, an acceptance rate under 2%. He planned to studied physics at the University of Arizona, seeing it as a strong foundation even if he later moved to another STEM field. Science runs in his family: his father is a geological engineer, and his grandfather worked at NASA on Mars rover projects. At CFHS, he was active in the robotics club, tech challenge, and Science Olympiad, and he served as band drum major. For his Flinn application he named math teacher Alyssa Keri as his distinguished educator, crediting her with teaching him to communicate and share his understanding with others. His advice to younger students: don't fixate on a single goal; follow what interests you.

Henry is a computer science student at UC Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, graduating in May 2027. He builds full-stack systems with TypeScript, React Native, Supabase, and Python, and he is especially interested in how AI agents and data infrastructure can support real-world learning and robotics. He began research right out of high school as a research and development intern at the University of Arizona (May 2023 to August 2024), joined Berkeley Lab as a research affiliate in October 2025, and became a student research assistant there in August 2026. His recent work explores GPU-accelerated design automation, machine learning for decision-making, and cloud platforms.

This past summer, Henry was an AI and cloud engineer intern at Oracle in Redwood City. Earlier, as a solar API intern with Energesque, he researched solar irradiance APIs and wrote a Java program to interpret the data. On campus, he joined Mobile Developers of Berkeley as a React Native developer building web UI for Baro, an early-stage startup, and has served as that client's project manager since January 2026.

Seth is a computer science student in the University of Arizona Honors College and was one of 20 Arizona students chosen for the 2024 Flinn Scholarship from more than 1,000 applicants. For his Flinn application, he named Pioneer coach Charlotte Ackerman as his Distinguished Educator. At UA, he began with independent student research (January to October 2025), creating two new basketball recruiting metrics that measure a player's team fit. That work led to his current role as a data science intern with Arizona Athletics, where he has deployed four machine learning models trained on more than 100 features across eight seasons of data. This past summer he was a software development engineer intern at IBM in Tucson, where he built and shipped an end-to-end Python agent for enterprise customers, and in summer 2025 he worked remotely as a technology consultant intern for Pairgap. He is also an HSF and HHF Scholar.

Christian started in robotics at Sunrise Drive Elementary and returned as a CFHS junior to teach Sunrise Drive students CAD and 3D printing. As Pioneer team captain, he led much of the work on Print Ready!, a curriculum that trains CFSD elementary teachers in 3D printing and CAD, drawing on his own dental device-printing internship. Print Ready! was a key factor in the team's Connect Award at the 2026 Arizona State Championship. He told KGUN 9 he wanted to get younger kids started in 3D printing because it changed his life.

Owen co-created Print Ready! with Christian and taught Sunrise Drive students CAD and 3D printing. He was on the 2025 Pioneer team that went undefeated at the Palo Verde-Goodyear Qualifier and won the Inspire Award, FTC's highest honor. He led the team's nomination video for Coach Ackerman, who placed second statewide for the Compass Award. He was also a National Merit Commended Student, a mentor to CFSD FIRST LEGO League teams, and a CFHS Theatre performer. He now hones his storytelling skills as a film student at NYU.