• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2022

• University of California Berkley, Mechanical Engineering, ‘24

• Host Institution: SpaceX

• Executive Mentor: Sassie Duggleby

• Brookie Mentor: Amy Huynh

Isabelle Peloso is a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley. She is pursuing a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration through the highly selective Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (M.E.T.) honors program.

Elle has had a life-long interest in space, sparked at an early age by her step-father’s Mars rover work at the NASA Ames Research Center and JPL. In 7th grade, she was awarded a scholarship to AAUW’s Tech Trek, an all-girls summer camp hosted at the University of California, Irvine. In 8th grade, as part of her award-winning History Day research project, she interviewed Gene Nora Jessen and Sarah Ratley from the Mercury 13. During her freshman year of high school, Isabelle enrolled in astronomy courses taught by Dr. Haeri, the chair of the Mathematics, Science, and Engineering department at Saddleback College. Impressed by her work and enthusiasm, Dr. Haeri invited Isabelle to join his undergraduate students and work at the college’s new observatory. During her junior year of high school, she became the first student chosen to lead the observatory’s community outreach program and to perform independent undergraduate research in adaptive optics.

At Berkeley, Isabelle is a member of the Society of Women Engineers. Last year, she participated in the program’s Team Tech, where she collaborated with Danaher on a project to analyze the warping on their incubator hatch door. Isabelle joined Space Enterprise at Berkeley (SEB) during her freshman year and worked as a community outreach lead on their business team. Through SEB, she directed a K-12 artwork competition in the Bay Area to promote the club’s upcoming rocket launch and inspire young students to “reach for the stars.”

In the summer of 2021, Isabelle worked at Rivian as a Mechanical Engineering Intern with the Body Closures Team in California. While there, she performed a Failure Mode and Effect Analysis on a power door inside the Rivian Prime Vehicle (RPV), supporting Rivian’s partnership with Amazon Prime to design and build 100,000 RPVs. Isabelle also worked at the Illinois manufacturing plant to support Rivian’s vehicle validation prototype builds for the RPV, working with the engineering teams and line workers to document over 100 failures within the power door.

Outside of her academic interests, Isabelle enjoys singing for Cal Jazz Choir, playing intramural soccer, traveling, and cooking.

As a Brookie, Isabelle will be working at SpaceX on the Starlink Space Lasers Team in Redmond, WA.