Maxwell Mamishev (S'23) is a B.S. student in electrical engineering with a double minor in business and East Asian languages and culture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He co-founded his first technology company at age 13 and filed his first utility patent at age 15 for a wearable LiDAR-based proximity sensor that was licensed, manufactured, and distributed to healthcare facilities; his second patent was for a device for the visually impaired. Both products are still in use today. He is interested in resilient communication systems, radiation-detection instrumentation, and sensing in environments where traditional approaches are not possible.

 

At UIUC, Maxwell joined the Center for Electric Machinery and Electromechanics and developed portable power electronics educational kits that have been incorporated into the curriculum. He is currently a member of the organizing committee for the Power and Energy Conference at Illinois (PECI). He is currently conducting research in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering, where he and his research team are developing a LiDAR-based liquid-level monitoring system for small modular nuclear reactors, where exposure to radiation precludes the use of traditional sensor placement. In 2026, a provisional patent was filed for the AI component of the system architecture. He leads a team of undergraduate researchers through the Department of Energy's Nuclear Science and Security Consortium.

 

In the summer of 2024, Maxwell installed a VLF antenna array at a field station in Virginia to detect ionospheric signatures of meteors during the Perseid shower. In the summer of 2025, as an NSF REU scholar at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, he designed RF power dividers for the Allen Telescope Array, detecting signals of another sort. Unfortunately, he did not receive any signals from extraterrestrial life, but the project served to further his work in the extraction of weak signals from large datasets. He still reports fireball sightings to the American Meteor Society and holds an amateur radio license (KM7DNF). These projects all came together in CommUnity, a system for resilient emergency communication over amateur radio. When natural disasters knock out cellular communication, amateur radio often provides the only means of communication over long distances, but the range of amateur radio communication depends on ionospheric conditions that change unpredictably. CommUnity detects those conditions in real time. The project won second place out of 148 international submissions in the IEEE Communications Society Student Competition.

 

Maxwell is the CEO of Extentek LLC, a technology startup that he co-founded to develop and manufacture assistive sensing technologies. He speaks conversational Japanese (JLPT N3). His publications include one journal paper, seven conference papers, and three patents (two granted, one pending). He is the Vice President for Professional Growth of the IEEE UIUC Student Branch and is a member of IEEE-HKN and Tau Beta Pi, where he received the Outstanding Initiate Award. He has managed projects with team members as young as middle school age to as old as 75, and welcomes new projects and collaborations.