Mentors

Product Development

(Technical)

Product Consultation

(Non-Technical)

Product Development (Technical)

Anqi Yu

Front-End Developer at Schlumberger.

Arnav Mishra

I grew up in the Bay Area and got my Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science at UIUC from 2014-2018. After graduation, I worked at Rubrik as a backend engineer till early 2020 when I switched to Siteline to be the 5th employee and 2nd engineer. Along with my daily role, I am also a mentor for Built By Girls and an avid 49ers/Warriors/Sharks/Giants fan!

Asif Billa

Back End Software Engineer in Schlumberger. Experienced with Java, Golang, NodeJs, typescript, Cloud Computing, Google Cloud Platform, REST APIs, Oracle, MySql, Cassandra, MongoDB etc.

Che Kun Law

Che Kun Law is currently a Roboticist at Vicarious AI, where he works on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for robots. He has diverse robotics experience in self-driving trucks, robots in agriculture, surveillance/military, logistics/warehouse, service, social robots, drones; and his passion is in using robotics and automation to create meaningful impact at scale. Che Kun has received five Product Design/Robotics awards such as the Singapore Good Design Mark (SG Mark) Award. He graduated from Purdue University with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, where he worked on mobile robotics for precision agriculture.

Christopher Jones

Product Manager for globally recognized non-profit, co-founder of Hackathon Mentors, former software engineer, former serial entrepreneur, former hacker.

Geoffrey Challen

I'm an educator who also loves to hack. I create content and tools that have helped thousands of students learn computer science and programming.

Haitham Mengad

I'm a PM and software engineer with experience in consumer products, enterprise software, venture capital, open source and academic research. Also a UIUC engineering alum!

Heather Huynh

Heather is a graduated Masters student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has previously interned at Google, Blend, and Los Alamos National Labs and focused her research on visualizing diversity in fashion. She also worked as a TA for many beginner level CS courses at UIUC. She hopes to use her skills to create impactful technology for others.

Jane Yang

I’m optimizing for positive social impact. My academic training is in engineering, so my mind tends to think in terms of systems. I’ve worked in international development and community development financing. These days, I analyze data, support on policy work, and push on civic engagement at the remote software company Basecamp.

Kevin Verre

I graduated UIUC in 2012 with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Business. Currently working for Apple as a full-stack web software engineer. I build internal tools websites with Django for other Apple employees to use. Currently living in East Palo Alto, California.

Kyle Begovich

I'm a recent graduate from the Math & CS program now working as a Software Engineer in privacy at Google. I've been engaged with many of the UIUC student events, other hackathons, and non-profit work in my spare time as a student. I am always looking to improve and give back to the technical education ecosystem and promote the welfare of our communities, so please feel free to reach out!

Margarita Zias

Margarita works as a full-time Information Security Associate and is currently based in Illinois. Although she has lived there for almost a year she says nothing can beat NYC pizza. Before moving, Margarita attended CUNY Queens College where she studied Computer Science. Her passion for cyber grew during her time working as project manager at the Queens College Tech Incubator. She describes herself as a complete geek and loves legos, superheroes, manga and anime. Fun fact, she actually grew up in a small town in Greece called Kastoria and came back to US for college!

Matthew Dierker

Hi! I'm Matt. 😄 I'm a former CS student that graduated in 2015. While at UIUC, I helped start HackIllinois, Sail, and loved participating in CS student activities! I'm happy to help mentor on anything web related (in particular I know Angular + Firebase but can probably help with most things), connecting with APIs, and getting a functional backend deployed. I'm happy to chat and help with things -- say hello!

Matthew Turk

I'm an assistant professor at the School of Information Sciences, where I teach data visualization and data storytelling, and I build open source, community-driven tools for data analysis and visualization. My background is in the physical sciences (astronomy) where I study how the first stars in the universe formed.

Nathan Handler

Nathan Handler has been involved with the open source community for over a decade, primarily through his roles as an Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux Developer and a member of the freenode IRC staff. During the day, he works as a Developer Advocate and Software Engineer at Orchid Labs, where he is helping to build the natural internet by creating an open marketplace for bandwidth built on Ethereum, and an open source VPN client for all major operating systems. Professionally, he enjoys working to improve the reliability and scalability of large applications, as well as exploring the latest cloud technologies.

Nerla Jean-Louis

I am currently working as an intern at IBM Research for the summer. I am also a phd student at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Nick Ettlinger

I studied Statistics and Machine learning from Carnegie Mellon, and have been working in industry for five years. I started out doing data science consulting, working with data from industrial clients like mining and aerospace companies. I'm now at edx, a higher education nonprofit founded by MIT and Harvard. I work with stakeholders throughout the company, helping guide experimentation and data driven decision making.

Pablo Aguiar

A Computer Scientist from Brazil and previously a software engineer at Globo.com, the internet branch of Latin America's largest media company, Pablo currently lives in Munich, Germany, disrupting the music industry with a revolutionary B2B solution based on cloud computing. He's got two decades of professional experience writing software mainly with Python, Go and Javascript. Lately, he's in an affair with both Elixir/OTP and Rust. In the hackathon, his expectation is to bring his experience and knowledge, as limited as they are, and hopefully help with whatever he can. Let's HackThis!

Pranjal Bhardwaj

I'm a Data Science & Machine Learning enthusiast. Experienced In building scalable Machine learning models and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. I am also a Blockchain and Ethereum enthusiast and I have been managing communities like HyperLedger Tamil Nadu and Ethereum India. Also the CEO and Co-founder of Collabrains, community of blockchain enthusiasts to build scalable blockchain products.

Reginald Davis

I'm a Site Reliability Engineer at Schlumberger with a focus on infrastructure automation. I enjoy teaching about how the cloud works and how businesses can leverage it to create more value for end-users.

Rohan Pandit

Hi! I'm Rohan. I just graduated from Columbia with a degree in Applied Mathematics and am now working in the Blockchain/Finance.

Sam Fineberg

Dr. Fineberg is a principal architect at Akamai Technologies. Sam has over 25 years of experience in areas including hyperscale storage, data analysis, non-volatile memory, high performance computing, and data preservation. At Akamai, he oversees the processing of multiple PB per day of internet logs from Akamai’s global network.

Silas Hsu

Hi! I'm a CS PhD student at UIUC in the area of Human-Computer Interaction. I am most experienced in web-development, and I'm passionate about music technology and making software that's stable and joyful to use.

Sneha Krishna Kumaran

I am a 6th year PhD student in Computer Science focusing on building educational technology for self-driven learners working with Prof. Brian Bailey. I received the State Farm Doctoral Fellowship in 2019. Prior to starting my graduate career, I completed my BS in Computer Science from Oregon State University, with an undergraduate thesis mentored by Prof. Rebecca Hutchinson and Prof. Thomas Dietterich.

Xiaoxia

I'm a senior software engineer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where I currently work on projects involving advance data analytics. In the past, I've also developed software for both commercial industry and scientific community. I am a master of computer science graduate here at UofI.