Announcements

For the 14th year in a row, MIT has been named No. 1 by the QS World University Rankings!

The AeroAstro monthly roundup will return in the fall! 

Guidance regarding current events

MIT is committed to keeping the community up to date on information regarding immigration and travel. The International Students Office (ISO) has recently updated their website with information on the continuation of student and scholar (F, J, M) visa interviews.

The Roundup is a monthly newsletter to keep the AeroAstro community up-to-date on research, community news, and important happenings across the department and MIT. Explore past issues of the Roundup on our website.

• Submit upcoming events to the Calendar (log-in required).
• Send us news about your research using this form.
• Visit the Communications Toolkit for resources and guidelines.

Community Corner

The Graduate Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics (ga^3) held an ice cream social to kick off the summer and beat the heat!

HR bits

Spot Awards: Colleagues recognized Esther Allen and Pam Fradkin for their hard work in June! Have someone you would like to recognize? Submit a nomination any time!

Upcoming events:

• AeroAstro Staff Outing – Wednesday, July 9, 12:30 to 2:30
• Save the date! Postdoc Appreciation event – Wednesday, September 17
• MyLife Services webinar: Empowerment through disability inclusion

Congrats to Rachael Draper and her husband Michael on their recent nuptials!

Congratulations!

Prof. Richard Linares has been awarded tenure! See all of the newly tenured School of Engineering faculty in MIT News.

Prof. Danielle Wood was awarded the 2025 Letten Prize for her outstanding work using space technology to create meaningful change for people on Earth.

PhD students Myrella Cabral (HRL) and Palak Patel (necstlab) have been named 2025 Amelia Earhart Fellows by Zonta International.

Nicole McGaa (HSL) was awarded a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation and, separately, was selected as a finalist for a 2025 Hertz Fellowship. Her work focuses on correcting physiological and psychological impacts of circadian rhythm disruptions in spaceflight.

The MIT team CERBERUZ is a phase 1 winner of NASA’s LunarRecycle Challenge! The challenge tasked teams with designing recycling solutions for non-metabolic waste that would accumulate over long-duration lunar missions. The team is looking forward to building and testing prototypes in phase II.

Jasmine Jerry Aloor (DINaMo) won the AIAA New England Torch Bearers in Aerospace Award for her outstanding contributions to the aerospace community. She was also selected for the Future Leaders in Aerospace Symposium 2025 at Penn State University.

Mollie Johnson and co-authors won a Distinguished Paper Award at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) 2025 conference for their paper "A second comparative study of the impact of virtual reality in aerospace education."

CommLab

Summer is a great time to catch up on communication tasks you have been putting off — like that website or resume update. The Comm Lab will be available all summer for 1-1 coaching to help with these and any other technical communication needs. The Comm Fellows can help you organize your thoughts and brainstorm, no draft required!

Make an appointment today to improve the effectiveness of your next paper, poster, presentation and more.

Check out our new and featured digital resources:

• Stop Presenting. Start Storytelling Blog
• Keep Track of your Thesis with a Writing Dashboard
• Portfolio CommKit
• Create Content for your personal website using good communication techniques

Highlights

Prof. Danielle Wood and the Space Enabled research group hosted the 2025 NASA Disasters Program science team meeting. The Program develops free and accessible resources that use Earth observations to reveal how natural hazards interact with vulnerability, exposure, and coping capacity in a changing climate.

In a video for the Michigan Institute for Plasma Science & Engineering, Prof. Carmen Guerra-Garcia discusses her research on the plasma physics of lightning strikes on airplanes, and what can be done to make planes safer.

Prof. Luca Carlone led the annual Robotics Science and Systems conference held at the University of Southern California, bringing together researchers in all areas of robotics from around the world.

Prof. Zack Cordero and graduate students Harsh Bhundiya and John Zhang attended the 8th AIAA Emerging Space Structures Summer Workshop in Colorado, presenting recent work on electrostatically-actuated antennas and Bhundiya’s PhD research. The group also visited Tendeng, a company developing advanced deployable satellite antennas.

Profs. Hamsa Balakrishnan, Richard de Neufville, and Amadeo Odoni taught a class at the Massport offices at Boston Logan airport as part of the 16.S799 Airport Systems Planning, Management, and Design class.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

July is Disability Pride Month, an annual observance that honors and celebrates individuals with disabilities, recognizing their lived experience, accomplishments, and struggles as a key part of society. The month of July was chosen to commemorate the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990. This landmark civil rights law prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities.

Resources: 

• Comm Lab accessible communications kit
• Blog: Thoughtful engagement with disability through inclusive design principles
• ADA anniversary tool kit

Submit DEI Feedback: aa-diversity@mit.edu

Research

DINaMo

Resolving conflicting constraints in multi-agent reinforcement learning with layered safety | Collaborative research from MIT and UC Berkeley proposes a method that integrates layers of safety into multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms to prevent collision avoidance.

ESL

Predictive thermal digital twin model for a renewably powered offshore AUV servicing platform | Researchers present the development and field testing of a thermal digital twin model for PEARL (Platform for Expanding AUV exploRation to Longer ranges), a system designed to extend the range, endurance, and data-handling capabilities of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles.

Interactive Robotics Group

Versatile demonstration interface: Toward more flexible robot demonstration collection | A new Learning from Demonstration (LfD) interface that makes it easier to collect data to train robots to perform new skills using three common modes of demonstration.

LIDS

AI-enabled control system helps autonomous drones stay on target in uncertain environments | Researchers developed a new adaptive control system that could help autonomous drones stay on target in uncertain environments.

REALM

Inroads to personalized AI trip planning | A new framework from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab supercharges language models, so they can reason over, interactively develop, and verify valid, complex travel agendas.

Space Enabled

Preliminary analysis of in-space servicing governance and the challenge of continuing supervision | Researchers examine how the emergence of commercial space missions to service satellites in orbit has exceeded the scope of existing U.S. regulations on how to supervise commercial activities in line with legal obligations.

Architecting a decision support system for continuing supervision of commercial in-space servicing | Researchers present a proof-of-concept Decision Support System for U.S. government stakeholders by simulating commercial satellite servicing mission phases, assessing collision risks, and identifying gaps in situational awareness within a flexible, modular software framework.

In the Media

CNN Science | A massive rocket explosion stirs up talk of setbacks. Are Musk’s Mars ambitions farther than they seem? | Prof. Olivier de Weck weighs in on SpaceX: “I am a fan of what SpaceX is trying to do…But it’s a logistical problem first and foremost.”

Boston Globe | New England companies are sparking an industrial revolution. Here’s how to harness it. | Prof. David Mindell explores how New England companies are meeting the moment in US manufacturing.

SpaceNews | How IM-2 payload operators made the most of the mission’s landing issues | The IM-2 mission may have ended sooner than hoped, but it gave the cross-MIT team invaluable flight experience that will shape future missions.

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