• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2019

• University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, B.S. Aerospace Engineering, '20

• Host Institution: HawkEye360

• Executive Mentor: Cristin Dorgelo

Elena Kamis is an System Operations Engineer at the HawkEye 360 Inc in Herndon, VA. As a child she spent most of her younger years doing activities including building circuits with old Christmas lights, putting together model rockets, sailing wind-powered toy cars and watching way too much Animal Planet.

Since then her love for science, specifically space sciences, has continued to grow. In college she was an active member of the Illinois Space Society (ISS), acting as the Engineering Council (EC) Representative, SEDS Chapter Representative, Educational Outreach Director, Senior Advisor, and Social Media Manager. She competed with her friends in NASA Space Grant 2017 placing third, NASA RASC-AL 2018 as a finalist team, and High Altitude Ballooning projects for the 2017 Solar Eclipse. As a Brookie Elena has given back as a Brookie Alumnae Mentor (BAM) and Social Media Coordinator. She is also a member of Alpha Omega Epsilon, a professional and social engineering sorority.

When she’s not launching rockets or designing missions to Mars, Elena finds joy in spreading her love of space through outreach work. She is a certified boy scout merit badge counselor for the Space Exploration merit badge, has taught Science Olympiad teams in Aerodynamics and Astronomy (all placing first), planned a five-week after school program called BLAST at a local elementary school, and more. Her favorite day of the year is Illinois Space Day (ISD) which is an event hosted by ISS annually dedicated to teaching 200+ local Illinois students about space and STEM topics. Her favorite thing in the world is to see the unbiased enthusiasm students have towards the sciences, no matter their gender, at those younger ages.

Elena now works at Hawkeye 360 Inc as a System Operations Engineer managing the scheduling and quality control of 12 satellites (soon to be 21!) in orbit. She enjoys yoga and exploring the NoVA region with her partner and dog. In the future, Elena hopes to continue to grow her outreach work in the community and is excited to continue to grow as an engineer.