• 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 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. She was, additionally, employed on campus for three years as an engineering assistant at the Qualcomm Institute Makerspace, which remains her second favorite job ever. While there, she started Make-Her-Space, a program
dedicated to teaching undergraduate women hands-on manufacturing skills, including woodworking, welding, and manual machining. Later, as the engineering lead of her rocketry team’s sugar motor rocket project, Gabrielle headed the first successful design, manufacture, test, launch, and recovery of an L3 rocket in the team’s six-year history.

She has previously interned at BlueHalo (now part of AeroVironment) testing components for anti-drone technology, as well as Draper Laboratory, where she worked on high precision mechanical gyroscopes. In 2024, Gabrielle’s broad technical experiences in aerospace, haptic medical device design, and wet lab work caught the eye of the Human Systems team at VAST. As an intern there, 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. 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, which sits squarely as her number one favorite job ever.