MARGOTBITS Robotics, Science, and Other Interesting Tidbits

BIO HIGHLIGHT — Margot Paez

Margot Paez believes her earliest memories are of computers, floppy disks, and programming books.

Her father introduced her to computers before she could read and he tells his friends that he taught her binary when she was 3 years old. She doesn't remember this. However, she does remember learning how to program in QBASIC around 8 years old.

In the 5th grade, young Margot popped open her Acer Sapphire and replaced a graphics card on her own, sparking over a decade of fascination with building and modifying her own computers. During this time, she also asked her parents to buy her a book on HTML. Coding for the web is her main source of programming for fun and profit since age 12. She continues to do freelance work in her spare time.

Not to be pingeonholed, Margot enjoys hamming it up on stage and in front of the camera. Her most favorite performance was playing in the all women Monty Python group, Monty Pythong. She is an amateur filmmaker and an occasional reporter. She started writing for print and web when she was in high school, beginning with her self-published entertainment magazine, Sexy Monkey Magazine. She was a guest editor for an upscale pet magazine and a former regular contributor to White Hot Magazine and the London Student newspaper. She has filed reports for KPFK and appeared as an expert on RT America. In 2011, she founded InsightOut News and published over 50 self-produced video reports on the Occupy LA movement through this outlet.

She has attended more universities than whole families of college grads and has multiple degrees in music and physics. She is currenty a PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology where she works on climate change, mitigation and adaptation. She's based in the Georgia Water Resources Institute, located in the civil and environmental engineering department.

Margot was a year round intern for 3 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA where she developed a web-based repository to house information about samples analyzed on various instruments. Her former lab has a Raman spectrometer, SHERLOC, that is part of the NASA Mars 2020 mission. She is proud to say that she made very minor contributions to this project. She hopes that after her PhD she can return to mop the floors of her former lab and return to her favorite couch for a much needed mid-day nap.