• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2025

• University of Waterloo, Mechatronics Engineering, ‘26

• Host Institution: Amazon Prime Air

• Mentor: TBD

• Brookie Mentor: TBD

Shanaya is a Junior at the University of Waterloo studying Mechatronics Engineering. She loves solving problems and designing hardware especially when there’s a fun challenge involved, like working around the conditions of outer space or marine environments. Because of this and her desire to contribute to projects that allow us to learn more about the world we live in, she has always been drawn to this industry.

For two years she was an electrical lead on her University’s CubeSat team, guiding the development of power and control systems. Together, they won the 2023 Canadian Satellite Design Challenge with their 3U CubeSat and were invited to ESA to compete for a launch opportunity. Most recently, she helped start up an underwater autonomous vehicle team where she’ll be focusing on audio localization and sonar communication.

Heading into university, she was recognized with Canada’s most coveted undergraduate STEM scholarship and works with an organization called The Debtless Students to help future undergrads pay off their tuition. She spends the rest of her time outside of school with a good book, collecting vinyl records, or playing Taylor Swift on guitar.

She has previously completed internships at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory where she worked on Project CETI to help decode sperm whale communications, and at Rocket Lab where her work focused primarily on reaction wheel hardware.

She couldn’t be more excited to join the Brookie community at Amazon Prime Air this summer!