GABRIELLE SCOTT 
(she/her)

  • Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2026

  • University of California, San Diego, Mechanical Engineering, ‘25

  • Mentor: TBD

  • Brookie Mentor: TBD

Gabrielle Scott is a recent graduate of the University of California, San Diego, where she majored in Mechanical Engineering.

While at UCSD, Gabrielle was employed on campus as an engineering assistant at the Qualcomm Institute Makerspace. There, she started Make-Her-Space, a program dedicated to teaching undergraduate women hands-on manufacturing skills, including woodworking, welding, and manual machining. She conducted undergraduate research in medical device design for women’s health as a Doris Howell Research Scholar and was a student engineer at UCSD’s Coral Reef Engineering Laboratory, where she designed test fixtures for analyzing coral polyp settlement patterns in 3D-bioprinted reef structures.

Later, as the engineering lead of her rocketry team’s sugar motor rocket project, Gabrielle headed the first successful design, build, launch, and recovery of an L3 rocket in the team’s six-year history. She has previously interned at BlueHalo (now part of AeroVironment), Draper Labs, and—mostly recently—VAST, where she had the opportunity to work directly with their resident astronaut advisor to design crew equipment for the company’s commercial space station.

When not building rockets or space stations, you will most likely find Gabrielle out on the dance floor, where she is a social and competitive West Coast Swing dancer. Outside of dance, Gabrielle is a serial hobbyist, with past interests ranging from urban foraging to figure art drawing and wood carving, She is currently on the hunt for her next new hobby. Some of her personal goals for this year are to design some sick space brackets, visit more dark sky parks, participate in an analog astronaut mission, and finally read all the books languishing on her bookshelf.

Gabrielle is ecstatic to have been selected for the Brooke Owens Fellowship Class of 2026 and will be continuing to work full-time as a design engineer on the Structures team at VAST.