JOHN
MEKHTARIAN
portfolio website
About
Mechanical engineering student at UC Santa Barbara, designing LED fixtures at California LightWorks and drivetrain for Gaucho Racing.
Most of what I know came from building things and then checking them. On the drivetrain that means sizing bearings against calculated loads and backing up FEA with hand calculations. At California LightWorks it means taking a fixture concept from SolidWorks model to prototype.
I am looking for a summer 2027 internship in mechanical design or R&D.
Portfolio
LED Fixture Ingress Protection
Modeled new horticultural LED fixture concepts at California LightWorks, solving for water ingress sealing, lens assembly durability and fixture efficacy.
Red Light Therapy Arm Mechanism
Redesigned the articulating arm on a red light therapy device to improve structural integrity, range of motion and user ergonomics. Pitched the changes to the owner and moved them into the product pipeline.
FSAE Drivetrain — GR26
Selected bearings for Gaucho Racing's drivetrain and sized them against calculated operating loads, checking FEA results against hand calculations for shear tear-out and bearing stress. GR26 was the first car in team history to pass every technical inspection at Formula SAE Electric.
Drivetrain Assembly Jig
Designed a jig to locate drivetrain components during build, and 3D printed fit-check parts to validate geometry before committing to machining.
Red Light Therapy Controller Firmware
Rewrote the controller firmware for a red light therapy unit in C++ on a Teensy 3.1. Protocol-driven touchscreen interface built over a per-region dose table, five defects corrected in the shipped code, and lamp-off safety invariants enforced on every screen transition.
Contact
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