Engineering Impact: Maureen Tejeda’s Internship with Ascender Systems

Founded in 2023, Ascender Systems is a San Diego-based startup developing a patented robotic climber and “leave-behind” system to strengthen disaster response and critical infrastructure protection. At the helm is USD alum Jorge Muniz (KSB ‘24), a veteran of military aviation, government contracting, and tech entrepreneurship, who brings a career’s worth of operational leadership into a mission-driven effort to protect communities in crisis.

This semester, Maureen Tejeda, a lawyer and Fulbright Scholar from the Dominican Republic pursuing her Master’s of Arts in Social Innovation at USD’s Kroc School, joined Ascender to support grant development and strategic planning. While Maureen brought over a decade of experience in social projects and public policy, this internship gave her a chance to work in an entirely new sector—emergency technology innovation—and apply her skills toward building more resilient communities.

Maureen’s work with Ascender Systems represents what makes the Social Innovation Internship so powerful: a dynamic blend of real-world problem-solving, purpose-driven leadership, and student-centered learning. Through this campus-wide program—led by USD’s Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Career Development Center, in partnership with Conscious Capitalism San Diego and generously supported by the Prebys Foundation—we are equipping students to engage with complex societal challenges and preparing them to lead in fields where innovation and impact go hand in hand.

Motivation & Background

Q: What inspired you to apply for the University of San Diego’s Social Innovation Internship, and how does it support your personal and professional aspirations?
The opportunity to give back to San Diego while also gaining professional experience in the United States. Working with Ascender Systems helped me develop skills in a field I had never worked in before, technology, while also gaining more experience in the private sector.

Q: What motivated Ascender Systems to participate in the Social Innovation Internship, and how does this partnership align with your mission of strengthening community resilience through technology?
Quite honestly, it was seeing Andrew Biros’ post on LinkedIn!  I had the honor of working with Andrew when this was a Social Innovation project during my time as a student at USD.  We worked on refining our value proposition as well as clearly linking back to the UN Sustainable Development Goals!  Once I saw his post, I believe I wrote to him and applied within minutes.

Regarding the alignment and our mission, while several of our grants are national/federal, our attention is definitely local.  We reach out and touch base with SD regional partners from the local Lions Club to the SD OES.  Our next series of outreaches will be the Cal Fire and Cal Operations.  We do truly believe that our technology can strengthen our community and are excited to identify those opportunities.

Inside the Internship: Technology for Social Good

Q: What does a typical week as a Social Innovation intern at Ascender Systems look like? What have been your main responsibilities?
Reading grant proposals haha! That’s one of my responsibilities, along with improving them. I also reach out to people to identify grant opportunities and help develop business scalability strategies.

Q: How has (student name) contributed to Ascender Systems’ efforts to develop disaster preparedness strategies and innovative emergency response solutions?
Specifically regarding developing a disaster preparedness strategy, our first step is to fund the R&D to complete the climber and leave behind units.  As this is still underway, we were extremely excited to hear of Maureen taking a grant writing class at USD.  That has enabled us to best focus her attention on our grant and proposal writing effort.  Thus far, for the months of February and March we generated 5 full proposals and white papers along with competitive applications for the Venture for Climate Change 2025. In the process for researching and identifying viable grants, we’ve had the pleasure of meeting with key leaders in the California Office of Emergency Services.  With a completed product, we can design and develop pre-positioning kits and fly-away units that we can offer to regional government agencies to integrate into their disaster planning and mitigation procedures.

Q: Your internship focused on researching and designing resilience strategies for vulnerable communities. What did you learn about the intersection of technology, disaster response, and social impact?
First, technology is a crucial ally in risk management and disaster response. Creativity in technology is key to driving social impact. A single technological tool can address multiple situations, from preparedness to mitigation, while also preventing hazards to the lives of emergency responders.

Q: From your perspective, how do young professionals contribute to advancing innovative solutions for disaster resilience and emergency preparedness?
I am exceptionally inspired to see how astute Maureen is in identifying alternate use-cases for the climber and leave–behind units.  As just one example, early this year, one of our team member’s family had unfortunately been affected by the LA Fires.  As she probed the dire situation, it became clear that the actual product we were working on (the R&D for Ascender Systems) could have been equipped with a loud-hailer-type device to announce evacuation procedures had commenced.  This team member’s story was that they had not received any announcement as the cell towers and all electrical power in their area was lost.  I found that to be an extremely innovative solution to a real world problem, and one that we are exploring to integrate into our v2.0 Leave-Behind.

Challenges, Growth, and Unexpected Lessons

Q: What was the biggest challenge you faced during the internship, and how did you navigate it?
Not being an engineer, I have to read a lot, search for the meaning of acronyms, conduct additional research on how things work, and ask Jorge to confirm that I’m understanding correctly.

Q: What surprised you most about working with (student name)?
Maureen has real-world knowledge and experience!!  I did not expect that of an intern at all!  I am extremely and pleasantly surprised.  This alone has made this experience a seamless transition as she came into this with ideas already!!  I am sincerely looking forward to continuing to work with Maureen so long as she’s willing AFTER the internship!  

The Future of Social Innovation Work

Q: How has this experience shaped your perspective on career paths in disaster management, technology-driven social impact, and community resilience?
A lot! I believe we should constantly ask ourselves how we can expand our solutions to other areas to ensure we’re addressing society’s needs and the sustainability of the business. It’s also crucial to engage directly with stakeholders, as their insights are key to scalability, even from someone who isn’t directly related to the topic you're working on. Finally, passion is important, but you also need to dive into opportunities outside to gain experience.

Q: How do university-industry partnerships like this help accelerate innovation in disaster preparedness and emergency response?
They bring in fresh, creative perspectives and insight that industry partners may have gotten away from due to becoming accustomed to bureaucratic red tape.  It’s really nice to have a unique perspective brought in that may have never been discussed or even considered before! 

Q: What advice would you give to future Social Innovation interns looking to make an impact in technology-driven community resilience efforts?
You do not need to be an engineer or even technically savvy, but you do need to be able to clearly see the bigger picture.  In our particular example, Maureen will often meet with me and the engineers on Thursday where we review their key findings, successes, and challenges.  

Through those conversations, we glean the community-related impact to our decision… so that literally just last week, we made serious consideration to dropping the leave-behind concept altogether. The community-related impact would have resulted in every system having an excess drive system and battery back-up.  A solution that would have been ultimately environmentally unacceptable.  

Written by Andrew Biros, EdD

Senior Director, Center for Social Innovation
Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost
University of San Diego

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the University of San Diego’s Social Innovation Internship, a campus-wide, interdisciplinary program led by the Center for Social Innovation and the Career Development Center. The program is organized in partnership with Conscious Capitalism San Diego and generously supported through a grant from the Prebys Foundation.