About Me

Aloha mai kākou! I’m Samantha Mallari, a software engineer based in Honolulu, developing flight and ground software for small satellites at the Hawaiʻi Space Flight Laboratory (HSFL).

At HSFL, I work on the CubeSats for Climate Change Monitoring (C3M) mission. As part of that work, I developed a custom radio protocol based on Selective Negative Acknowledgement (SNACK) for reliable, high-throughput data transfer over low-cost UHF radios on 1U CubeSats, which I presented at the 2026 Small Satellite Conference in Utah.

I earned my B.S. (2025) and M.S. (2026) in Computer Science from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa through the combined Bachelor’s and Master’s pathway. Before that, I got my start in high school robotics and Science Olympiad, competing in events like Detector Building, Circuit Lab, Optics, and Astronomy. That’s where I first fell for the space where software meets hardware, and it’s what eventually led me to work on actual spacecraft. I hope my work can help inspire future engineers the way those programs inspired me.

These days, my interests span embedded systems, human-computer interaction, and machine learning for space and Earth science. I’m always happy to connect with people building the next generation of space tech, so feel free to reach out!

Outside the lab, I enjoy reading, attending concerts, discovering new coffee and matcha spots, and tinkering with electronics.

This site is home to my research, the things I’ve built, and the things I’ve learned.

More to come!