Sophie Milam (So-fee My-Lum) was born in San Antonio, TX the third of four children and only girl to Nick and Danielle Milam. Moving to Evanston, IL at the age of 12 Sophie attended Haven Jr. High and Evanston Township High School before moving to Hilo, HI to attend the University of Hawaii at Hilo in 2006. Four years later Sophie graduated with a B.A. in Physics, a B.S. in Astronomy, a minor in math, a fellowship from the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium, an internship at the NASA Ames Academy, and hundreds of hours of experience working with the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES). Enrolling at the University of Idaho’s Mechanical Engineering Masters program in 2012, Sophie received a 2-year fellowship with the Idaho Space Grant Consortium doing the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program (RLEP) which sent her to NASA Ames for 10 weeks during the summers of 2012 and 2013 to work with the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) on the tensegrity structure called SuperBallBot. Sophie spent the last semester of her Masters of Engineering program starting an eight month long isolation and confinement study called HI-SEAS (Hawaii – ) where she and five other participants’ teamwork and cohesion as a crew provided data to scientists from many universities. Leaving the HI-SEAS habitat in June of 2015 Sophie moved to Smelterville, ID to reunite with her boyfriend, Casey Winchel, dog, Charly LaRue, hedgehog, Slim Pricklins, and fish, Land Captain. She currently works at Silver Valley Laboratories Analytical as a Mercury Analyst and Systems Engineer and spends her free time enjoying the wide open beauty of north Idaho’s rivers, lakes, and mountains whether its floating and hiking in the summer or skiing and sledding in the winter.
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