Mentors

Kevin Wojcik is in his 3rd year at UCSB studying computer science in the College of Creative Studies. When on team 1717 in 2009, Kevin was a programmer and driver. This will be his third year as a mentor for the programming team and will also be in charge of driver training and tryouts.

Alex Adams is a computer engineering major, physics minor, at UCSB. Alex was a member of team 1717 during the 2007-2008 season and now mentors the programming team. In his spare time Alex climbs, hikes, runs, reads books, and works on fun programming and electronics projects.

Lennie Araki currently works at FLIR Systems, Inc and has been mentoring the Software/Programming Team for the past three seasons. He graduated from UCSB in 1983 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.  He is a near SB-native and the proud father of Haley who is a graduate of the DPEA program and Jeffrey who is a sophomore at DP. He enjoys playing beach volleyball and tennis in his spare time.

Zach Dominguez graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (BSME) and Georgia Institute of Technology (MSME) with concentrations in biomechanics.  He is currently working at Allergan Medical in Goleta.  This will be hi second year mentoring with team 1717 on the SolidWorks team.

Jason Hoover graduated with a B.S. in EE and a minor in physics at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He work at Allergan Medical in Goleta, and has actually been a part of the First Robotics competitions before when he was in high school.  It was a different category (smaller robot) but the experience was great, and that’s what really got him sucked into engineering. He's worked in various industries (audio, aerospace, and now medical) over the last few years and he’ll try to bring some of his background to the team. This will be his first year with team 1717, and joined not only to benefit and learn from the students and other mentors, but has a family-friend connection to DP (Jessica Faass)! He’ll be helping out mainly with the electronics and pneumatics, maybe some programming as well since he has experience in that area and is looking forward to a good and productive year!

David Perez has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.  HIs experience has been predominantly designing analog, power and infrared electronic hardware for military aircraft and ground vehicles.  He enjoys mentoring students at the Engineering Academy and  passing on the knowledge that he has gained over the last 30 years in the engineering field.