Mentors
The Open Hardware Creators in Academia mentors worked with fellows by providing feedback on the fellow's hardware projects, research content, and contributing to our cohort meetings and overall cohort resources from this program. Mentors represented the open hardware community in both industry and academia.
Brandon Stafford
Brandon is an engineer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA. He grew up north of Boston and spent a lot of time building tree forts and skateboard ramps as an adolescent. After a degree in English and a few years of teaching high school math, Brandon went to grad school in mechanical engineering.
Since grad school, Brandon has worked at the Stanford Robotics Lab, Mindtribe Product Engineering, and as a consultant for various renewable energy startups. For five years, he ran Rascal Micro, a startup building small computers for art and science.
At Tufts, Brandon teaches hands-on courses in electronics (ME 30) and mechanical design (ME 93-DF).
César Garcia Saez
César García Sáez. Speaker and researcher specialized in digital fabrication, Internet of Things and maker movement.
Host at La Hora Maker, a podcast in Spanish focused on Maker Movement and digital fabrication. Co-founder of Makespace Madrid. FabAcademy graduate at Fablab León. Madrid Mini Maker Faire organizer. Co-founder of Madrid IoT meetup group. Exhibitor and speaker at European events like European Maker Faire, FabFestival (Toulouse). Author of the books “Digital Fabrication, maker movement and the future of work”, “We need to make (almost) everything – A social and education look at Fab Labs and the maker movement”.
Appointed by COTEC Foundation, focused on Innovation at a national scale, as Expert in 3D Printing for Societal and Economical impact. Mentor at European Social Innovation Challenge.
Before switching roles to my current position, I worked at System Administrator for 14+ years at Madrid City Council. I won the first ever intra-entrepreneurship innovation challenge for public workers in our city, using a design thinking approach.
Chris Chronopoulos
Chris is a cofounder and board member of Interstitial Technology, a public benefit cooperative and consulting firm that develops open source technology as a force for good, with a focus on environmental sustainability and human rights. Through Interstitial, he has carried forward a number of hardware projects into OSHWA compliance, and presented on the topic of Open Standards as they apply to open source hardware.
Chris' background is in scientific computing and instrumentation, primarily in the fields of neuroscience and astrophysics. On the side, he is active in the DIY music community, having developed a number of tools for the Linux audio ecosystem, and an open-hardware hand tracking interface for musical expression.
Elizabeth Hendrex
Elizabeth Hendrex is the CEO of Great Scott Gadgets. Her leadership and hands-on approach help with financial oversight, process improvements, logistics coordination, and people management. She has been an integral part of helping GSG grow in its mission to put open source tools into the hands of innovative people since joining the team six years ago. Elizabeth received a Bachelor of Science degree in Technical Communication as a non-traditional (single parent, career-changing, working adult) student at Metro State University of Denver. She chose this path because of her interest in technical writing and aviation technology, and shortly after discovered a passion for open-source hardware that would become her career. When she’s not at her desk, she’s probably driving the kids around, practicing yoga, watering the orchids, or learning a new song on the guitar or keyboard.
Huaishu Peng
Huaishu Peng is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Maryland, College Park. His multi-disciplinary research interests range from human-computer interaction, mixed reality, and robotic fabrication. He builds software and machine prototypes that make the design and fabrication of 3D models interactive. He also looks into new techniques that can fabricate 3D interactive objects. His work has been published in CHI, UIST and SIGGRAPH and won Best Paper Nominee. His work has also been featured in media such as Wired, MIT Technology Review, Techcrunch, and Gizmodo.
Jinger Zeng
Jinger Zeng is currently the contest manager at Hackster.io. Prior to joining Hackster, she was the community manager of the PX4 open source drones community, and the founder of hardware company Dronesmith Technologies. She is an active advocate in the open hardware space, and have a wide range of experiences in working with different stages of companies from startups to corporates, academia, manufactures, and organized events from meetups to developer summits.
Joshua Pearce
Joshua M. Pearce received his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. He then developed the first Sustainability program in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and helped develop the Collaborative Applied Sustainability graduate engineering program while at Queen’s University, Canada. Then he was the first Richard Witte Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a Professor cross-appointed in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Michigan Technological University where he inaugurated and was the faculty advisor for the Michigan Tech Open Source Hardware Enterprise and ran the Open Sustainability Technology Research Group. He was a Fulbright-Aalto University Distinguished Chair and is a visiting professor of Photovoltaics and Nanoengineering at Aalto University as well as a visiting Professor Équipe de Recherche sur les Processus Innovatifs (ERPI), Université de Lorraine, France. He is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university.