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Tanya Mittal

  • Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2020

  • North Carolina State University, Aerospace Engineering, ‘20

  • Host Institution: Made In Space

  • Mentor: Jenn Gustetic

Tanya Mittal is a 4th-year aerospace engineering student at North Carolina State University (NCSU) with minors in Nano-science & Technology as well as Art & Design.

While attending high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM), she was drawn to engineering both by her coursework and by her FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team. Through those experiences, Tanya discovered a passion for technical problem-solving. Her mentors, however, encouraged her not only to pursue that passion, but also to maintain the diversity of her interests—to grow as an engineer, but also to grow as a person.

In college, Tanya kept her love for creating, working in an NC State Libraries Makerspace and the Virtual Reality/3D scanning Studios, teaching workshops and acting as an envoy for new technologies. She helped lead the Video Game Development Club at NCSU as an officer, and she joined the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space at NCSU to help ignite and fuel a passion for space in her peers. She is now also a mentor for her old FIRST Robotics team, acting in hopes of encouraging students to find their own inspired paths, as her mentors did for her.

Tanya previously interned at Kitty Hawk, working in their manufacturing division, performing systematic problem solving and composites manufacturing engineering for their project Cora, an autonomous eVTOL aircraft.

As a 2020 Brooke Owens Fellow, Tanya will be interning at Made In Space, Inc., working on Archinaut technologies that aim ultimately to allow for off-world manufacturing that would enable the assembly of large structures in orbit.