Space Cookies Mentors
Mentoring is the process by which an experienced person actively shares their knowledge and experiences to provide advice, support, and encouragement to a less experienced person. Mentorship is a key element of the FIRST program.
Interested in mentoring the Space Cookies?
We welcome mentors from all backgrounds who share our interest in STEM and community outreach programs.
ELENA ALVAREZ
Former Space Cookie and mechanical mentor Elena was a member of our leadership team for several years before graduating in 2017. After completing a BS in mechanical engineering at the University of Portland, she returned to the Golden State. Elena is currently a mechanical engineer employed by Insight Global and is working as a Reliability Engineering Technician assigned to Meta. We aren’t entirely sure what she does at work, but it seems to involve dropping assorted objects from great heights. We hope she does not plan to do that with our robot. When she is not mentoring, she volunteers with the UC Master Food Preservers and spends quality time with her three pet rats: Smudge, Jelly, and Kiki. Much to our surprise, they are pretty darn cute.
HENRIQUE CHAN
Henrique has been a Space Cookies Mentor for nine years, working his way up our professional ladder to become our lead tech mentor. He started with FIRST as an FLLer in third grade, recently celebrating his 20th year of involvement. We are sad that he is only mentoring us from afar during the Reefscape season, but he has chose to spend the year as far as he could possibly get from California while he completes his masters in mechanical engineering at Cornell. He now knows how snow works and reports that it is very cold. Henrique did his undergraduate work in ME at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and remains an ardent Mustang supporter. He is passionate about engineering design, machine tools, robot strategy, and most importantly, potatoes. Baked, fried, boiled, roasted, mashed, smashed, totted, poutined - those all work for him.
SUSAN CHENG
Head mentor and troop leader Susan Cheng joined the Space Cookies as a business mentor in 2013 and kept adding responsibilities until one day in 2019 when she found that she was doing…pretty much everything. Susan has a background in mathematics (BA, MA, Argonne & Los Alamos National Labs) and finance (MBA, PhD, Columbia faculty). She spent nearly twenty years in venture capital investing and was a founder of IDG Ventures. She tried to retire in 2010, but that did not take and she returned to academics until 2015. Since then, she has been telling people she is officially retired, while secretly working full time as a Space Cookies volunteer. We are proud to say that she was the Woodie Flowers finalist at the 2022 Monterey Bay Regional! In the two hours a week she is not in the lab, Susan enjoys puzzles of all varieties (math, word, jigsaw, etc.). Pro tip: she can be bribed with Diet Coke.
SHOSHANAH COHEN
Our other head mentor and troop leader, Shosh Cohen, also joined Space Cookies in 2013; she currently focuses on our team’s local and global outreach. By day, she directs service learning in engineering at Stanford University and teaches Stanford’s mechanical engineering senior capstone class. She has been a Girl Scout since the dawn of time and a GS leader for more than 20 years. Before moving to academia, Shosh had a long career in operations management consulting and literally wrote the book on supply chain strategy. She holds a BS in industrial engineering from Stanford, an MA in technology strategy from Boston University, and an MBA from Harvard. Her email handle “icyshosh” comes from her colliding worlds as a hockey player and avid baker; if it’s a weekend and she’s not in the lab, she’s probably icing a puck or icing a cake.
LINDSEY DRONE
One bright summer day, Lindsey wandered over to the Space Cookies demo at the NASA Ames summer picnic after learning about the team from a fellow NASA Employee and FRC mentor of an East Coast team. We aren’t sure exactly what she thought she getting herself into, but we were all to happy to snag her as a mechanical mentor. Lindsey is a data engineer at NASA Ames by day…and often by night, spending many late evenings and early mornings in the Ames Unitary Plan Wind Tunnels, where she tests various air and spacecraft components. Luckily for Lindsey – and for us – our lab is just across the from the UPWT so it’s easy to convince her she can just stay at Ames instead of going home to get some sleep. Lindsey graduated from the University of Denver with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. When she is actually able to get away from NASA, she enjoys archery, video games, and enriching her ever growing collection of shark facts.
FERNANDO ESPINOSA
One bright summer day, Fernando wandered over to the Space Cookies demo at the NASA Ames employee picnic before signing up as a programming mentor. Does that sound familiar? That’s because Fernando and Lindsey were wandering together. Fernando works in the Ames psychophysiology lab, testing biosensor monitoring and managing medical data that will support crew health and performance during future space exploration missions and gets to play around in high-fidelity space analogs. Put another way, he gets to travel to asteroids, Mars, and the Moon without actually leaving Ames. Fernando holds a BS in biomedical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Sinaloa in Mexico. Since joining Space Cookies, he has discovered an untapped passion for craft projects, including sock puppets and gingerbread houses.
RYAN LEE
Ryan enjoys coding, cooking, memorizing random facts about FRC teams, attending physical therapy sessions, and long dreamy walks on the Ames campus. He has a large number of sisters and other assorted family members, all of whom are astounded at how much time he spends working with the team. Ryan has been a Space Cookies programming mentor for five years and recently took over as lead technical mentor when Henrique abandoned him to pursue his graduate studies. He is a recovering high school dropout, who earned a BS in computer science at the University of Rochester. He was an AI software engineer at NVIDIA for six years before realizing that he might as well quit his job and move into our lab since he was already there close to 24x7. He has been a FIRST referee for 15 years and has inspired several rule changes because he stubbornly insists on following the rules.
MICHAEL MITTMANN
Michael Mittmann has been kind enough to stick with the Space Cookies even after his two daughters left the Ames nest. He is an accomplished genetic scientist by day and a renaissance man on nights and weekends, spending countless hours building our field every season. Michael is never too busy to whip up an elaborate cake to celebrate…well, anything really. Unless of course it is March 14, in which case he is never too busy to whip up a pie. When his kids were small, Michael rigged up an apparatus consisting of numerous helium balloons, which he then attached to his daughters and let them fly…literally. We assume they came down at some point, because they both became Space Cookies.
MICHAEL MONTEGUT
Michael Montegut has been a Space Cookies mentor for four years, helping with FLL mentoring and business/marketing—a great fit for someone who specializes in improving public speaking and writing skills. Michael has given talks at high schools across the Bay Area. He has worn many hats: NRC Postdoctoral Fellow, nonprofit campaign manager, NIH Center Director, big data analyst, experimental psychologist, healthcare consultant, blogger, and probably a few more he’s blocked out. While a postdoc at NASA-Ames, he created the first VR flyover of Mars using Mariner 9 and Viking Lander data, a simulation displayed at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. In his spare time, Michael enjoys gardening, cooking, and writing for his blog. Michael holds a doctorate in Psychology from UC Santa Cruz. He is known for his super-hot pepper sauce and the mysterious fermented experiments lurking in his kitchen.
LAUREL O’MALLEY
Our former mechanical captain, Laurel graduated from Space Cookies in 2016 and has been plotting her return ever since. She joined us in 2023 as a mentor, shifting her focus to the business side of the team, working to expand our m.e. FIRST menstrual equity initiative. Laurel currently works as a cost engineer at Bloom Energy, a solid oxide fuel cell manufacturer. She attended Northeastern University in Boston; her bachelors is in Industrial Engineering and her masters is in Engineering Management. Laurel has never had a cup of coffee and is trying to convince other mentors to resist the call of the caffeine that flows through our lab, with limited success. Laurel has lived in four countries and is a direct descendant of Irish pirates. Is breá linn Laurel!
JEFF SINSAY
Jeff joined the Space Cookies in 2023 as a mechanical design and fabrication mentor. He greatly enjoys his three minute commute to our lab from his day job at Ames Research Center, where he works for the US Army on conceptual design of future helicopters and UAVs, specializing in the analysis and optimization of the aerodynamics and dynamics of helicopter rotors. As Ames is home to the world’s largest wind tunnel, Jeff can skip right past scale models and test his designs at full size. Jeff holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering from UCLA, and an MS and PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has set several US national records for electric radio controlled sailplanes.Which explains why he’s going to stick with FRC until we finally get a flying robot game. We hope.