Blake Pennel

SELF Fellowship · Honors · GPA 3.9

• Study abroad at Korea University, with coursework in AI and deep learning.

• Designed and developed an agentic AI application for NASA’s Deep Space Network that analyzes cybersecurity vulnerabilities and generates actionable remediation recommendations (write-up).
• Researched and evaluated tradeoffs in model integration, application architecture, and cybersecurity requirements, translating findings into system design and implementation decisions.

• Researched, prototyped, and delivered machine learning solutions, evaluating hardware, software, framework, and model tradeoffs to produce a sponsor-facing deliverable and an end-to-end demo.
• Developed a repeatable process for integrating machine learning into existing projects, and collaborated with multiple teams to add AI capabilities to their systems.

• Designed, prototyped, and demonstrated integrated hardware and software systems for research, evaluation, and partner-facing efforts.
• Researched and implemented AI, computer vision, embedded and IoT, cloud, networking, and security technologies with vendor engineering teams to guide technical integration decisions.

Self-hosted MCP servers over my own Google Maps Timeline; found and fixed an undocumented multi-part backup format, recovering all 8,551 segments (write-up).

Added Firefox session auth and inline MCP file resources with tests, and deployed it headless with a remote-login browser (write-up, code) (github.com/Blake192/canvasmcp).

Blake Pennel. “Automating Cybersecurity Recommendations for Remediation of Vulnerabilities within NASA’s Deep Space Network: An Agentic Approach.” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 2026. Technical report. PDF

• Two-time CyberPatriot National Finalist, ranking in the top 0.1% nationally among 5,264 teams.
• Programmed a FIRST Tech Challenge robot for manual and autonomous operation with computer vision.