• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2026

• Yale University, Mechanical Engineering, ‘27

• Mentor: TBD

• Brookie Mentor: TBD

Ava Schwarz is a junior at Yale studying Mechanical Engineering. She aspires to become an astronaut and wants to set foot on Mars in the next twenty years. Ava was homeschooled for twelve years and grew up all over the United States with a boisterous clan of siblings. In her junior year, she started at a local public school and founded a team to compete in the NASA TechRise Challenge. Her team’s winning proposal obtained the opportunity to build a 2U CubeSat to study atmospheric radiation on a sounding rocket flight. The process of building that payload made it clear that engineering would be her path to space exploration.

At Yale, Ava is the Co-President of the Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association (YUAA), where she spearheads a variety of engineering projects. Within the YUAA, she is a member of the Fluids subteam of Yale Project Liquid, which is developing a regeneratively-cooled bipropellant liquid rocket engine. Outside of the classroom and workshop, she has competed in rugby and ballroom dance and dabbles in running, lifting, knitting, boxing, theatrics, and more.

Last summer, Ava worked at Firefly Aerospace as a Spacecraft Assembly, Integration, & Test intern for the Blue Ghost program. She spent most of her time in the cleanroom working on Firefly’s next lunar lander and transfer (satellite) vehicles. The experience was a dream come true. She is absolutely thrilled to be joining SpaceX’s Starship program in Starbase this summer, where she will be working on structural design for the Super Heavy booster. All glory be to God!