When Elena Chau walks the stage at the Nevada Engineering graduation on May 14, she’ll do so with more than a few accolades under her belt, including the statewide Lieberman award.

Heading into her next chapter, she draws on experiences gained at multiple internships — including stints at NASA and Disney — as well as her involvement in several campus clubs.

Yes, she’s accomplished. But the computer science and engineering major says it’s a matter of unconditionally believing in yourself.

“When [people talk about] computer science or engineering in general, everyone thinks it is a challenging subject, sometimes even describing it with words like ‘impossible’,” Chau said. “I like to take words like ‘impossible’ out of my vocabulary. Instead, I focus on progress over results with an optimistic attitude. I emphatically have confidence in anyone’s ability to succeed, in others and myself as well.” 

Unexpected honor

Despite her accomplishments, Chau was surprised to learn she had received the Sam Lieberman Regents’ Award for Student Scholarship earlier this spring. 

“That was actually insane,” she said, laughing.

Chau was one of nine students to receive the statewide honor, awarded by the Nevada System of Higher Education for academic achievement, leadership and service. 

Chau will be recognized at the Honor the Best ceremony at the Joe Crowley Student Union.

“Elena is an ambitious, empathetic and collaborative student who balances academic rigor with leadership, professionalism and community service,” Engineering Associate Dean Indira Chatterjee said, in her nomination of Chau for the Lieberman award.

Chatterjee specifically called out Chau’s NASA and Disney internships, along with her software development internship at startup LionDragon Studio and her participation in Google’s TechWise program, an 18-month curriculum preparing students for software engineering careers. She also cited Chau’s work as a teaching fellow helping students in CS 202 debug C++ code, as well as her involvement in student clubs such as Society for Women Engineers, University Gray for Glioblastoma, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega.

“Through all these activities, she has built strong, quality relationships with her peers,” Chatterjee said. “She has inspired others to engage in community service ... consistently demonstrating strong leadership and positively impacting the community.” 

Putting yourself out there

Chau’s stellar college career began much like everyone else’s. She matriculated into the University of Nevada, Reno in 2021, a high school graduate from Las Vegas who had studied biotechnology at West Career & Technical Academy. She was apprehensive, like many first-year students, but determined to find her place in the Wolf Pack.

“I really wanted to put myself out there freshman year, because I was really shy,” she said.

NevadaFIT, the University’s Freshman Intensive Training Program required for all first-year students, helped her connect with her peers, as did her time living in Great Basin Hall.

“It’s a supportive community,” she said. “I met all my closest friends from the dorms ... we all conveniently lived down the hall.” 

She switched her academic focus to computer science from biotechnology, chasing her own interest in problem-solving. She got involved in student clubs, including the Society of Women Engineers, where she met Chatterjee, the group’s faculty mentor. She participated in NCLab Career Training, a career-prep program for those heading into the tech industry. 

In the thick of college life, she decided to take a gap year to complete a year-long software engineering internship at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. There, she worked on managing attraction downtimes and troubleshooting problems.

“I essentially created an AI chatbot to help sustaining engineers diagnose attraction downtimes from a large data lake,” she said. 

Returning to the University in fall 2025, she jumped right back into academic life, including serving as president of the campus chapter of Society for Women Engineers.

“(She) did an outstanding job,” Engineering Teaching Associate Professor Ann-Marie Vollstedt said. “She is highly organized, communicates clearly and brings people together around a shared goal. She also put systems in place that will benefit the organization well beyond her time as president.”

Also this year, Chau was recognized with the Community Partnership Impact Award at the 2026 Northern Nevada Diversity Summit in April and took second place in Nevada Engineering’s Madani Gordaninejad Speech Competition for her talk “Chess: the Ultimate Game of Strategy and Life.” 

At this year’s Innovation Day — Nevada Engineering’s annual event in which senior student teams present their capstone design projects — under the guidance of their faculty advisor Parikshit Maini, Chau and her teammates Isaiah McLain, Yovan Hirales and Jairo Cadena-Mendez placed first in the Capstone Design Project Competition in the category of Engineering Design. Their project, AGROS-WHORL-E, is an autonomous drone that applies agrochemicals to agricultural crops for selective breeding processes. 

A strong finish to a strong undergraduate career: Chau got there by believing in herself, and she encourages others to be similarly audacious. 

“That’s what I tell a lot of my peers and friends,” she said. “Be OK with discomfort. Focus on yourself and continuously build your momentum. If you want to do something, you can genuinely do it.”