• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2024

• CU Boulder, Aerospace Engineering, ‘26

• Host Institution: ABL Space Systems

• Mentor: Tamaira Ross

• Brookie Mentor: Carson Brumley

Leya Shaw is a sophomore at CU Boulder, majoring in Aerospace Engineering and minoring in Astronomy. Despite having a fear of space as a child, she discovered her passion for the final frontier during Covid through stargazing and binging youtube videos about the space race and astrophysics.

Leya got her start on the First Nations Launch team where she had the opportunity to design, test, and manufacture a high powered rocket. With this experience, she then co-founded CU Boulder’s competition rocket team which participates in NASA’s University Student Launch Initiative. The team is currently tasked with building a high powered rocket that can deploy an autonomous drone upon descent. Leya is involved with the avionics for the launch vehicle and drone payload. As a part of the competition, she also has partnered with k-12 schools in the local Denver area to teach students about rocketry and coding and to encourage them to pursue a career in STEM.

Outside of school and rockets, Leya studies spacecraft-plasma interactions at CU Boulder’s Autonomous Vehicle Systems lab. She is also helping develop a microfluidic chip that can sort rare earth metal particles for recycling electronic waste at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Leya is excited to join ABL Space Systems this summer as an Avionics Engineering Fellow!