Jessy Schingler
Jessy is a collaborative web technology developer at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. At Ames she is involved in the development and assessment of technical platforms for making government science data and programmatic participation more accessible. She is also currently pursuing a masters degree in Computer Science, focusing on the automated analysis of social networks via email. Her overall research interests revolve around making sense of large scale data sets, in particular those involving human behaviour.
Prior to her work at NASA, Jessy helped to launch and author the first two years of the Space Security Index, an initiative funded by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs to build dialog on critical questions of security in outer space. She continued her work through the Center for Defense Information and the Pugwash organization, in Washington, DC.
Jessy has always been interested in ways that we can create community through collaboration, and vice versa. The Choza is a lifelong experiment for exploring these ideas.
Julia Tizard
Julia Tizard works as Operations Manager for Virgin Galactic, supporting the set up of what is hoped to be the world’s first commercial spaceline. Julia is motivated to enable personal space travel as she hopes it will offer new perspectives and interest in our home planet and the universe. Julia has been working for Virgin Galactic since 2005, after completing here PhD in Astrophysics. She has a longstanding interest in space and particularly likes using the space settlement ideal as a platform to discuss new structures for society and new ways of living.
Julia is an avid mountain climber and loves the outdoors. The Alps are her favorite place on the planet. She loves the personal and physical challenge mountaineering offers and the sense of grounding that basic outdoor life offers.
Julia is an amateur artist which she hopes to practice more at the Choza. For her the Choza is a life experiment. She hopes the place will offer a sustainable and inspiring platform for individuals and communities to develop their own interests and inspire new directions for life and society.
Stephanie Townsend
Stephanie is a lawyer and humanitarian with experience in diverse regions of the world. Most recently she was coordinating the Darfur Programmes of the International Organization for Migration in Sudan, working to address the needs of internally displaced people in Darfur. She has a background in science and law, having worked in molecular biology at NASA Ames Resarch Center in Mountain View, California following undergraduate studies in biology and chemistry and holding a juris doctorate and a Master’s of Arts in International Law from the United Nations mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica where she subsequently taught international law to Master’s students from around the world.
Following several years’ teaching at the university, she was invited to Kazakhstan by the U.S. State Department on a Fulbright Scholar grant to teach business and international law courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. While in Kazakhstan, she founded and LLM (Master of Laws) programme in International Business Law, the first LLM in the region. In addition to professorial posts, she has pursued law practice in both the commercial and non-commercial sectors in the United States, Latin America, and Central Asia. She has founded several non-profit organizations, acted as legal counsel to a rapidly developing internet technology company, and continues to consult in private legal practice in Northern Arizona on land use, public utilities, municipal law, commercial law, probate and immigration issues.
Robbie Schingler
Robbie Schingler just spent 9 of the last 12 years working at NASA working on creating new programs (most recently the Space Technology program and the Open Government Program at NASA Headquarters from 2010-2011), serving as an Engineering Program Manager (a joint MIT/NASA mission called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)) and co-founded various other positively disruptive projects such as the NASA CoLab project in 2006, the LAUNCH conference series and Random Hacks of Kindness in 2009.
Before taking coming back to NASA for the third time, Robbie went to Costa Rica for the summer of 2005 and found the Choza property, a truck called “Hank”, and began renovating the house at the Choza. The combination of physical labor and timeless persistance in the town on Concepcion brings perspective to Robbie’s long-term goals and current projects. Robbie continues to be surprised with lessons of innovation, development and humanity in participating in the Choza.
