Leya Shaw has been named a 2024 Brooke Owens Fellow. The highly competitive program provides paid internships and mentoring to exceptional undergraduate women seeking careers in aviation or space exploration.
A sophomore aerospace major at the University of Colorado Boulder, Shaw is also 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 will join ABL Space Systems this summer as an Avionics Engineering Fellow.
The Brooke Owens Fellowship program honors the memory of Brooke Owens, a space industry pioneer and accomplished pilot.
Owens’ career took her to NASA, the X-Prize Foundation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the White House. Her enthusiasm and passion for aerospace led friends and colleagues to create a foundation to inspire and train exceptional undergraduate women with the same zeal for space exploration.
Honoree bio from BrookeOwensFellowship.org. Check out their website for information on all of the winners.