• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2023

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Aerospace Engineering, ‘24

• Host Institution: Joby Aviation

• Mentor: Chris DeMay

• Brookie Mentor: TBD

Tatiana Michel is majoring in Aerospace engineering and participating in Hoeft's Technology and Management minor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She believes that bridging the two worlds of business and engineering is crucial and aligns with her future career.

Illinois has been her hometown for her entire life and is where she always loved watching the windmills whirling in fields. She initially learned about her interest in engineering when she competed in VEX robotics in her first year of high school. After VEX, she continued to follow her interests in FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) throughout the rest of high school and later joined FSAE for three years in college. However, the windmills she saw as a child made her love the diversity within Aerospace engineering.

In the Summer of 2022, Tatiana got her first taste of the aerospace industry when she interned at Honeybee Robotics under the Dragonfly Mission. The mission is designed to explore diverse environments that could present evidence of life on Saturn's largest moon - Titan. She designed, built, and validated a testbed that simulated Titan's ground conditions for the mission's sampling drill. She further analyzed and mitigated failure modes of this testbed in cryogenic conditions. Because of this enjoyable experience, she is continuing as an Environmental Test Engineer at Boeing.

Tatiana is excited to continue growing in her career within the space industry. She enjoys dancing, rock climbing, cooking, learning languages, and giving back to the community in her free time. Outreach will always have a special place in Tatiana's heart, as no matter where she goes in life, she plans to uplift those who are underrepresented and appreciated. So she thoroughly enjoys dedicating time to providing resources to fellow SHPE members needing scholarships or internships, prospective college students, and elementary students who do not know what STEM is.

As a Brook Owen Fellow, she will intern with Joby Aviation in Santa Cruz, CA.