At Cambium, GenZ Engineers Are an X-Factor

The aerospace and defense industry runs on experience. Decades of it. At Cambium, that experience is the bedrock, and a younger generation of engineers is actively building on it, advancing faster and better than the field has managed before.

Cambium’s young cohort of employees work out of a building in El Segundo where an astronaut mural covers one of the lab walls. It’s not ironic.

Sophia: Materials & Process Engineer

Sophia Pina didn’t plan on polymers. She enrolled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on a bioengineering track and fell into a coatings research group that changed her direction entirely. Her faculty advisor ran the polymer science master’s program, and since she was already enjoying the work, she decided to go deeper.

At Cambium she has traded pure research for something she finds more satisfying: product development for problems people actually need solved. Her days move between the fume hood, optimizing formulations and the shop floor, working alongside mechanical engineers on testing and with fabrication technicians on sample manufacturing. Her take on the field is simple: “There are so many problems to solve and so much work to be done, and not just on the research level. Materials can do anything.” What she means is that the bottleneck is almost never the science. It’s getting the science out the door.

Andrius: Materials Engineer

Andrius Stankus came to materials science through a detour. He enrolled at USC as a mechanical engineering student, knowing only that he wanted to work with his hands. A freshman research stint designing zero-gravity propulsion systems with the Air Force Research Laboratory pointed him toward research. Three years in the composites lab followed. By graduation he had worked across both of USC’s rocket labs – the liquid propulsion research side and the solid rocket program that would eventually become the Daybreak mission.

That connection came full circle at Cambium. When USC’s Rocket Propulsion Lab needed a material sufficiently strong, light and heat-resistant to expand their rocket’s aerodynamic profile and carry a payload to space, they turned to Andrius, who leveraged Cambium’s aerospace R&D platform to deliver a custom high-temperature material to spec. Two weeks later that material was delivered, put on a rocket and launched into space just six weeks later.

He joined Cambium because of the pace. “I’m able to see the work that I do,” he says. “I’m able to actually see it without having to wait 10 years.” His breakthrough moments aren’t numbers on a screen. They happen in front of an oxy-acetylene torch pointed at a composite sample. He has watched baseline materials get shredded. When a Cambium ablative sits in front of that torch for a minute and nothing happens, he says, “That’s crazy. That’s a breakthrough.”

That drive shapes what he’s reaching for next: a competitive alternative to an ablative that has dominated for decades. The phenolic carbon ablators on the Artemis rocket are essentially identical to those developed during the space race. “Just having something that’s competitive enough to be used alongside or instead of something that has been the same for 60 years,” he says. “That’s pretty cool.”

Lanie: Computational Materials Scientist

Lanie Leung grew up in Queens, studied biochemistry at the City College of New York, and spent enough time pipetting in a food tech lab that she started looking for a better way to think. She pivoted to Chemical Engineering, earned a graduate degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and then made her way to Cambium.

Her job sits at an intersection that didn’t exist a decade ago: using computational modeling to understand what a molecule will do before anyone has synthesized it. In pharmaceuticals, the end-to-end process can take 10 years, with synthesis as the primary bottleneck. At Cambium, the model runs first. “You can look at whether something is going to be good before the chemist has even finished setting up the synthesis,” she says.

“Understanding things is really going to be the heart of improving them,” she says. “It’s about the brain power, not just the machinery.”

In five years, she wants to crack something specific: a solid set of design rules for monomers in a narrow, demanding use case. “Maybe for something like 500 degrees C under specific directional forces,” she says. “Generalized structure-function relationships are probably not going to happen as a universal rule, but for a narrow use case? We’ll get there.”

That work is happening at every level of experience, from engineers who have spent careers building to a younger generation pushing it further, faster. Sophia, Andrius and Lanie are part of what makes that possible, and at Cambium, that’s not a tension to manage. It’s the strategy. The legacy and the leap, in the same building.