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
Space Cookie alum and mechanical mentor Elena was a member of our leadership team 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 at 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. 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.
Scott Berman
Live wire Scott has been enamored with building robots since before Dean Kamen dreamed up the idea of FIRST and has been an electrical mentor for FRC teams since 2020, focusing on electrical systems, electronics, and embedded software design and implementation. See if you can guess what his day job is. Ohm my goodness, if you guessed electrical engineer, you are correct! Armed with a spark-ling personality, Scott current-ly develops electronics for robotic agricultural systems at Blue River Technology and also has many years of experience designing power electronic systems used in electric vehicles and aerospace applications. We are de-light-ed to have him as a mentor. And that’s watts up.
Michael Bick
Michael’s deets are coming soon!
HENRIQUE CHAN
Henrique has been with us for nine years, working his way up our ladder to become our lead tech mentor. He started as an FLLer in third grade, recently celebrating his 21st year of FIRST involvement. He mentored from afar during the Reefscape season, having chosen to spend the year as far as he could possibly get from California while completing a 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 us as a business mentor in 2013 and kept adding responsibilities until 2019 when she found that she was doing…pretty much everything. Susan has a background in math (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 at Space Cookies. 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/troop leader, Shosh Cohen, also joined in 2013. By day, you can find her at Stanford University, where she directs service learning in engineering 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 she’s not in the lab, she’s probably icing a puck or icing a cake.
Nick Dal Porto
Check back soon to learn more about Nick
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/FRC mentor. We aren’t exactly sure what she thought she getting herself into, but we were 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 air and spacecraft components. Luckily for Lindsey – and for us – our lab is adjacent to the UPWT so she can just stay at Ames instead of going home to 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.
Luan Heimlich
FIRST Australia was started by “an American expat…leading to rapid growth from one team to hundreds nationally”. So yeah, Luan does not do things halfway! She has done just about everything you can imagine in FIRST, ranging from FLL to FRC to founding and mentoring Hall of Fame team Thunder Down Under to being named a Woodie Flowers finalist in 2014. After returning to the US, she found she could not stay away from FRC, landing at our lab at NASA. A certified STEMinist, Luan holds a BS in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA from RPI. Oh…we should mention that she is also the Senior Regional Director for FIRST California.
Sarah Heimlich
Even as a small child, Sarah knew she wanted to be a Space Cookies mentor, carefully charting a path to arrive at our lab in 2025. She got some practice mentoring Team 3132 in Sydney, focusing on awards and strategy. Apparently she is good at that because in 2017, Team 3132 became the first team outside North America to be inducted into the FIRST Hall of Fame. A FIRST all-star, Sarah was a Woodie Flowers finalist in 2019 and is currently a lead FRC judge advisor. Sarah studied CS and software engineering at Macquarie University and now spends her work days as a senior product manager at Blue River Technology. She spends a lot of time in Iowa and knows a lot about corn.
James Kuszmaul
James joined FIRST in 2009 as an FLLer and has not looked back, enjoying steady career progression as a student, volunteer, and mentor. As one of our newest mentors, he has not yet experienced the joys of mini golf, dress-like-a-mentor-day, or cupcake wars—but rest assured, he will. He is currently a robotics software engineer at Blue River Technology, where he builds systems to reduce herbicide waste by using cameras to identify and target weeds in farm fields.
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 daughters were small, Michael rigged up an apparatus consisting of numerous helium balloons, which he then attached to them and let them fly…literally. Don’t worry, they came down at some point.
MICHAEL MONTEGUT
Michael Montegut has been a Space Cookies mentor for four years, helping with FLL mentoring and business/marketing—a great fit for a specialist in public speaking and writing skills. 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 Ames, he created a 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 blogging. 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 immediately begin plotting her return. 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!
Austin Schuh
The first episode of All About Austin is coming your way soon!
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, where he works for the US Army on conceptual design of future helicopters and UAVs, specializing in the analysis and optimization 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.