New members (and goodbyes)

I’d like to extend a big welcome to our eleven new members. I can confidently say that we have our most talented and driven team yet, and I’m excited to see what we accomplish this year.

Anika Nesarikar joins us as our new PR director, where she will manage our community outreach and sponsorship initiatives.

Jai Peris, Sasha Luich, and Meyli join our veteran member Connor Scally to form our first ever dedicated Hardware, Software, and Electrical group. They each bring valuable experience, and their efforts will keep our vehicle running smoothly.

Chitsein Htun, Hansika Sundaresan, Ashwin Somasundaram, Harsha Kota, Jesse Musa, and Stepan Antonyuk form our core development team, which is in charge of designing algorithms and writing new code for Navigator. They are managed by Daniel Vayman, our first-ever development lead.

I’d also like to say goodbye to some departing members.

Dylan Hiu, last year’s PR Director, was the first to ever hold the position. He wrote member highlights for our website that brought credit to the contributions of our members. He started our Instgram account and produced some excellent videos for the team, even following the car on his skateboard to get some shots in motion.

Egan Johnson, Jim Moore, Nikhil Narvekar, Ragib Arnab, and Joshua Williams each left a huge impact on our project as core developers. They spent many late nights/early mornings in our lab doing everything necessary to get our goals met. While each of them was capable of thinking through complex math and high-level planning, they were inevitably asked to do unglamorous work, too: fixing broken dependencies, tracing loose wires on the car, and resolving segmentation faults (ugh). There are rumors that a couple of them will make their return to Nova in the future… In any case, they were all-stars.

You can see our new members and read their bios on our homepage (click on their photos). Welcome once more to each of them, and here’s to a great new year!