About Me
Hello! This is Elena Chong, from Panama City, Panama. As of fall 2018, I am a first year graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, in the Responsive Environments Group. In 2016, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering with minors in Robotics and Mathematics from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Indiana, United States.
Previous Work
I did a couple of internship during my undergraduate and started a company between undergraduate and grad school, here are some of my contributions:
Lewis Research Group at the Wyss Institute - Harvard
For the first two weeks, I joined Electroninks, a spin-off from the lab, where I helped with sourcing components for the educational product in Shenzhen, China. For the rest of the summer, I worked at Voxel8, a 3D printing start-up working on the world’s first 3D electronics printer (another start-up from Professor Jennifer Lewis) before they started manufacturing shoes…
Tri-dimensional printing of vertical conductive traces using silver nanoparticle.
HCI Group at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics - Saarland University
While at Max-Planck, I worked on creating proof-of-concept for our project called, HotFlex: a new approach allowing precisely located parts of a 3D object to transition on demand from a solid into a deformable state and back.
Tinkerall in Panama City, Panama
After graduting from undergrad, I returned to Panama to start a company inspired by the Maker Movement. Me and my team developed several hands-on courses and workshop for students and teachers.
I also served as the Program Coordinator for the National Program for Digital Fabrication and Maker Culture in Panama. I managed a budget of $525,000 for establishing four pilot fablab across the country.
Me and several makers organized the first Panama Maker Day in 2016.
I was also featured briefly in Forbes CentroAmerica in December 2016.
I started a youtube channel for teaching electronics and basic programming in the Spanish language. So far we have around 2.5k subscribers. I am planning to make video tutorials about all the things I have learned by taking this class. If you speak Spanish and are interested in getting involved, contact me!