When Andrew Jimenez first spotted the Ocean Exchange Collegiate Award on LinkedIn, he almost scrolled past it. A sophomore electrical engineering student at College of the Canyons (COC) in Santa Clarita, he figured the competition — built for students tackling ocean sustainability — was out of his league against teams from four-year universities. He applied anyway. Last month in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he found out it wasn’t.
Jimenez was named one of five Collegiate Award recipients at the 2026 Ocean Exchange summit, held October 25–27, and was the only community college student among the ten finalists chosen by delegates from business, academia, government and nonprofit organizations. His startup, Noble Deep, walked away with a $10,000 prize.
Noble Deep is building an autonomous underwater vehicle called Casper, designed to continuously monitor subsea infrastructure — pipelines, power cables and the foundations of offshore wind turbines — without needing a ship and crew to do it manually. The team, which also includes Jimenez’s brother (a 2023 COC alumnus serving as CTO) and a UC Irvine software engineer, is now building a charging station to keep Casper running long-term. The $10,000 will go toward finishing a working demonstrator the team hopes will help win its first pilot projects.
Jimenez’s interest in ocean technology grew out of his work with COC’s Honors Transfer Research Council, where his research project looked at ways to extract manganese nodules from the seafloor with less environmental damage than some mining companies have proposed. That research became the seed for Noble Deep.
Paloma Vargas, interim dean of COC’s School of Mathematics, Sciences and Engineering, praised Jimenez for carrying that recognition onto an international stage. Jimenez, who plans to transfer to UC Berkeley in fall 2027 to continue studying electrical engineering, said simply reaching the finalist round already felt like a win before the award was even announced.
It’s a reminder that some of the Santa Clarita Valley’s most ambitious new ventures are starting in community college classrooms rather than garages or incubators — and that local founders are already competing, and winning, on a global stage.
Source: The Signal
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