MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics | June 2021 |
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This will be our last Roundup until August 2021. Have a great summer! |
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WATCH: 🎓 AeroAstro Commencement Celebration 🎓
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🎉 Zoom Chat Cheering Section 🎉
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Noteworthy News, Awards & Honors: |
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Danielle Wood and the Media Lab will host Prof. Moriba Jah, of the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Aerospace Engineering for a public talk on June 24 on Space Environmentalism. All are invited to attend.
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Chelsea Onyeador was recognized as an awardee and Thomas Roberts was recognized with ab honorable mention by 2021 Ford Foundation Fellowship Programs, which are administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The programs seek to increase the diversity of the nation's college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, to maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and to increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.
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Together with their collaborators, Björn Lütjens and Brandon Leshchinskiy received a United States Department of the Air Force MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator Directors' Award “for cross-organization collaboration and curation of novel data sets, the visualization of forecasts, and the delivery of an innovative challenge problem.” Christopher Chin was among the group recognized with a United States Department of the Air Force MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator Challenge Award "for the design and implementation of complex challenge problems to enable optimal aircrew scheduling." Learn more about USAF-MIT AI Accelerator research.
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Olivier de Weck and his co-authors were awarded the Best Paper of the Year Award for 2020 by the journal Systems Engineering for their paper “Handling the COVID‐19 crisis: Toward an agile model‐based systems approach.” The paper proposed a new approach for modeling and managing COVID-19 not only as a health crisis but as a complex system with multiple levels of models, and decision-making similar to a C4ISR system. Read the full paper and the Q&A by MIT News.
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Grad student Ezinne Uzo-Okoro was named Assistant Director for Space Policy by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
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Spot Award recipients for the month of May included: Bryt Bradley, Karen Bruce, Robin Courchesne-Sato, Pam Fradkin, Denise Phillips, and Dave Robertson.
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Danielle Wood and AeroAstro alumna Christine Joseph published a paper on increasing access to microgravity research.
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Wishing our LGBTQIA+ community a happy Pride! |
Celebrate Pride Month with LBGTQ@MIT!
The Rainbow Lounge will be sharing some recommendations for media by LGBTQ+ creators and/or about LGBTQ+ people twice a week on their social media accounts: Instagram and Facebook.
Week 2 (6/15 and 6/17): Things to play
- Released video games
- Games to Wishlist/lookout for
Week 3 (6/22 and 6/24 ): Things to read
- Books (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc.)
- Comics and webcomics
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Celebrate Pride with the Greater Boston Community!
Boston Pride will hold virtual events to commemorate Pride Month and the 50th Anniversary of Boston Pride in June. Learn more: bostonpride.org.
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AeroAstro hopes you celebrate Pride any way that feels safest and most comfortable for you! |
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Diversity, Inclusion, & Innovation (DI&I) |
Juneteenth Resources:
WATCH: "This is why Juneteenth is important for America"
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In the Community Corner, we will highlight information about reporting paths, resources for professional development and accountability, and other tips for navigating tricky professional situations. |
MIT’s Learn and Grow page is a great resource that outlines opportunities for personal and professional development, including virtual workshops around inclusive practices, bystander intervention, ways to build inclusive cultures, and more.
Learn more about the local and institute reporting paths available to AeroAstro faculty, staff, and students: aeroastro.mit.edu/reporting.
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Successful ~*VIRTUAL*~ Thesis Defenders |
Congratulations
Dr. Karthik Kavassery Gopalakrishnan!
June 1, 2021
Modeling and Control of Networked Systems: Applications to Air Transportation
Congratulations
Dr. Akshat Agarwal!
June 4, 2021
Quantifying and reducing the uncertainties in global contrail radiative forcing
Congratulations
Dr. Matthew Moraguez!
June 16, 2021
Modeling and Optimization of In-Space Manufacturing to Inform Technology Development
Did you successfully defend your graduate thesis? Send a photo to aa-communications@mit.edu to be featured as one of our Successful Defenders!
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Below are a few highlights of AeroAstro publications and media coverage: |
Danielle Wood
Big Think
Guillaume Chossiere
UPI
MOXIE
WIRED
Jeff Hoffman
Gizmodo
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Congratulations Liz Zotos! |
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🌟 Rising Stars in Aerospace 🌟
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The first Rising Stars in Aerospace workshop was held on May 26-28. The goal of the workshop was to increase the participation of people underrepresented among aerospace engineering professionals in academia and industry and was co-sponsored by the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford, and the Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. 35 senior PhD students and postdocs from across the United States and Europe joined the event virtually.
The workshop featured a keynote address by Professor Darryll Pines (President and Glenn L. Martin Professor of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland College Park). Panel topics included the job search/interview process, paths to academia and industry, tenure and promotion, and work-life balance. Participants presented their research to the attendees during “job talk starts” and poster presentations, and networked among each other and one-on-one with mentors.
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Screenshots courtesy of Joyce Light.
Special thanks to the workshop planning committee: Paulo Lozano, Hamsa Balakrishnan, Sara Cody, Wesley Harris, Daniel Hastings, Joyce Light, Denise Phillips, Raina K. Puels, Nicholas Roy, and Moe Win.
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What's 10,000x thinner than a human hair but 100x stronger than steel? Ashely Kaiser, a graduating PhD student in the department of materials science and engineering, worked with MIT AeroAstro's necstlab and NASA to leverage carbon nanotubes in designing stronger, tougher, and lighter materials for future space vehicles and habitats. Watch the video.
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Inigo Del Portillo and his colleagues presented a paper detailing a comparison of the four largest global satellite network proposals, from SpaceX, Telesat, OneWeb, and Amazon at the IEEE International Conference on Communications. The researchers calculated each network’s throughput, or global data capacity, based on their technical specifications as reported to the Federal Communications Commission. assess the data capacity of proposed satellite mega-networks from SpaceX (top left), OneWeb (top right), Telesat (bottom left), and Amazon (bottom right). Shown here are the satellite configurations of each network as specified in their filings. While the networks vary in their proposed number and configuration of satellites, ground stations, and communication capabilities, the team found that each constellation could provide a total capacity of around tens of terabits per second. As proposed, these megaconstellations would likely not replace current land-based networks, which can support thousands of terabits per second. However, the team concludes that the space-based fleets could fill in the gaps where conventional cable connections have been unfeasible or inaccessible, such as in rural areas, remote polar and coastal regions, and even in the air and overseas. The paper’s co-authors at MIT include graduate student and lead author Nils Pachler, along with Edward Crawley, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering, and Bruce Cameron, Director of the System Architecture Group. Read the story on MIT News.
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Picture this: A delivery drone suffers some minor wing damage on its flight. Should it land immediately, carry on as usual, or reroute to a new destination? A digital twin, a computer model of the drone that has been flying the same route and now experiences the same damage in its virtual world, can help make the call. Digital twins are an important part of engineering, medicine, and urban planning, but in most of these cases each twin is a bespoke, custom implementation that only works with a specific application. Michael Kapteyn SM ’18, PhD ’21 has now developed a model that can enable the deployment of digital twins at scale — creating twins for a whole fleet of drones, for instance. Read the full story on MIT News.
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Grad student Theo Mouratidis was profiled by MIT News, where he shared his path to MIT and describe his research making fusion energy a viable source of plentiful carbon-free energy for coming generations. Supported by the MIT Energy Initiative as an MIT Energy Fellow, sponsored by Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), Mouratidis is focused on creating special magnets for a future fusion pilot plant called ARC. Fusion, the energy source of the sun and stars, occurs when two atomic nuclei in a plasma collide and fuse, forming a heavier nucleus and releasing energy in the form of neutrons. Because this plasma responds to magnetic fields, researchers use a doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak to contain it. Wrapped with magnets, a tokamak is designed to keep the hot plasma away from the walls of the toroidal vacuum chamber while fusion reactions take place. Read the full story.
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Linda (Getch) Dawson ’71 grew up during the height of the space race between the United States and the USSR. She recalls driving with her family from Massachusetts to a New Hampshire observatory to hear the beeping of the Soviet satellite Sputnik as it passed overhead. “It’s funny how your path takes different turns, but I always came back to that first love: aerospace,” she says. Dawson’s path took her from MIT to NASA, then into a second career as a teacher and a writer, earning her the nickname “Rocket Woman” from colleagues and journalists along the way. Read the full story.
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Recently graduated New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program alums Chloe Nelson-Arzuaga, Jeana Choi, Daniel Gonzalez-Diaz, Leilani Trautman, Rima Rebei, and Berke Saat, who have together studied autonomous robotics since they entered NEET during their sophomore year at MIT. simulated autonomous air pollution monitoring system is the capstone project. graduated from MIT with a certificate from NEET’s Autonomous Machines “Thread,” with a curriculum based in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Course 16) that also incorporates classes and seminars from Course 2 and Course 6. Read the full story.
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🎓 Congratulations to the MIT Class of 2021! 🎓 |
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Photo courtesy of Ashley Kaiser.
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Do you have highlights to include in future editions of the Monthly Roundup?
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