Jinger Zeng is a tech entrepreneur, community builder, and evangelist for open-source technology and open science. She currently works as the contest manager at Hackster.io, a global platform that enables developers and innovators from around the world to learn and share about hardware and electronics.
Studied mechanical engineering at UNLV, she was the project engineer for the award-winning UNLV’s net-zero solar house DesertSol project for the Solar Decathlon 2013 competition. The prototype net-zero solar house was her first journey into project-based engineering learning and open innovation. Since then she’s on a mission to understand the path of technology commercialization, from research to market.
She was the co-founder of UNLV’s robotics spin-off start-up Dronesmith Technologies, the company created open hardware and software for drone application development. Jinger then spent 5 years in China as a consultant working with manufacturers connecting product designers, startups, academic institutions, and developers from around the globe to innovation resources and capabilities.
She is an active advocate in the open hardware space, and serves as mentor and advisor to startups in go-to-market strategies and product design. She organized cross-region and global developer activities and events, from meetups, contests, and hackathons, to developer summits, to foster knowledge sharing in the innovation ecosystems.
With her current role at Hackster.io, she is passionate about bridging community resources and creating cross-culture initiatives and programs that drive impactful results to educate the next generations of engineers with an entrepreneurial mindset.
She is a mentor in the OSHWA trailblazer fellowship program and works with the fellows to promote and adopt open-source practices in academia.