Fellowship

The Summit Fellowship was founded in 2013 prior to the annual Open Hardware Summit at MIT by Summit Chair Addie Wagenknecht and OSHWA Director Alicia Gibb as a way to encourage marginalized people in open technology and culture to actively participate and foster a more diverse community within open source. By offering the annual travel and summit conference assistance to community members, the Open Source Hardware Association hopes we as a community can encourage more women, nonbinary, trans, LGBTQA+, Black, Indigenous, people of color and disabled people to participate in open source. We have many strong leaders and speakers in our field and we personally want to continue the trend upward.

For the thirteenth year, we are excited to offer up Open Hardware Fellowships to ten members of the community which includes a stipend, entrance to the Open Hardware Summit and mentorship opportunities leading up to the event.

2026 Summit Fellows

Meet our 2026 Summit Fellows

Eli Silver

    Eli is an engineer and designer passionate about accessible science. As a Research Engineer in the Harris Lab at Brown University, he creates experimental equipment and turns designs into open-hardware projects. On the side, he enjoys building electronic instruments and interactive robots.

    Jessica Stanley

      Jessica Stanley is a researcher and maker working mainly with e-textiles and flexible electronics, and has worked on both (mostly) creative and (purely) technical projects in those areas, from e-textiles synthesizers to medical smart garments. She is currently a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.

      Olivia Cueva

        Olivia is a radical dreamer, designer, technologist, and researcher. Her work bridges creative technology, fashion, biomaterials, and storytelling to explore transformation, regeneration, and collective care. Drawing from her ancestral lineages she creates future-facing innovation that take the form of garments, installations, and interactive experiences that invite audiences to reimagine their relationship with the materials they wear and the systems they participate in.

        Her practice moves fluidly between community-centered education, speculative design, and research into sustainable and bio-based materials—always with the aim of sparking dialogue, nurturing resilience, and envisioning more just futures.

        Fiona Bell

          Fiona Bell is a researcher, designer, technologist, and Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, directing the Entangled Ecologies Lab. Merging human-computer interaction, materials science, and biodesign, she develops novel biomaterials that integrate with digital technologies to create sustainable bio-digital artifacts.

          Yafira Martinez

            Yafira Martinez is a design engineer and creative technologist with a background in computer science and a master's degree from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Her work sits at the intersection of physical computing, embedded systems, and interface design, building interactive devices and experiences that attend to the material qualities of technology: its texture, form, and the way objects feel in the hands of the people using them. She is particularly interested in soft and calm approaches to computing, and her practice often incorporates e-textiles and soft electronics as a way of making technology more approachable, expressive, and human.

            Yafira is a passionate advocate for open source tools and their role in expanding access to creative technology, experimentation, and knowledge sharing. She believes that good engineering and genuine curiosity belong in the same room, and her practice reflects that: pairing strong technical foundations with unconventional, tactile, and carefully crafted user experiences.

            When she’s not making, you’ll find her tinkering with e-textiles, sketching ideas, experimenting in the kitchen, taking photos, playing chess, or hunting down beautifully designed snack packaging (and eating what’s inside). She is driven by curiosity, hands-on exploration, and always crafting something new, including over at @electrocutelab.

            Daniela Guevra

              Daniela Guevara is an artist and designer whose practice explores the relationships between bodies, technologies, and ecosystems. Through installations, performative devices, and experimental interfaces, they develop projects that investigate forms of interdependence and multispecies coexistence within contexts shaped by ecological crises and normative structures. Their work has been presented in Spain, Portugal, and Berlin, and has been recognized at A MAZE. Berlin and the ADCE Student Awards. They hold a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and a Master’s degree in Audiovisual Innovation and Interactive Environments from BAU College of Arts & Design Barcelona.

              Dolunay Solmaz

                Dolunay is an electrical engineer and sound artist. Her practice is shaped by the instrumentalization of technical tools; motors, inductor microphones, hydrophones, and sensors are reimagined as central subjects. She constructs unstable, responsive environments - often driven by feedback and proximity where listening becomes a site of negotiation between human intention, material resistance, and machine logic. Her recent research engages with goblinhood and sonic cyborgism as modes of undoing coherence: embracing noise, excess, and misalignment in sound. She studied Electronics Engineering at Boğaziçi University. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Music at the Istanbul Technical University’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Music, and will begin her MFA in Sound Art at Columbia University School of the Arts in Fall 2026. Her work has been presented at Arter Museum, Istanbul (2025); PdMaxCon25~, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2025); and Harvestworks, New York (2025). She is currently in residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.