MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics | December 2024

Announcements

That’s a wrap on 2024! MIT will be closed for the holiday break from December 25 through January 1. The monthly roundup will pause during the Independent Activities Period and return in February.

Check out this year’s IAP course offerings from AeroAstro.

Submit your photo to be featured on our Meet AeroAstro screen: Share a fun fact, your research interests, or anything else you would like the community to know about you, along with your favorite photo of yourself, to be featured in the second floor hallway in building 33.

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.

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Community Corner

Staff celebrated the holidays with our annual Yankee Swap. The sweaters were delightfully ugly, but all swaps were made with good cheer!

📸 Spotted by Pam Fradkin: a graduate student taking a breather after completing her 16.485 “Visual Navigation for Autonomous Vehicles” exam. We knew she’d do well – she’s got eyes like a hawk!

HR bits

Spot Awards: Douglas Purdy, Pam Fradkin, and MaryAnn Carey are this month’s winners for their outstanding contributions to the department. Have someone you would like to recognize? Submit a nomination any time!

Congratulations to Karen Bruce on her promotion to the role of Facilities Administrator. Her knack for keeping things in order may eventually rub off on her friend Oscar, too.

A warm welcome to Kevin Slowik, who joined the department as our new Financial Assistant 2.

Congratulations!

Professor Zoltán S. Spakovszky received the 2025 AIAA Air Breathing Propulsion Award for outstanding and sustained contributions to air-breathing propulsion through rigorous discoveries and advancements in compressor aerodynamic and aerostructural stability and in aeroengine acoustics.

Prof. Hamsa Balakrishnan has been elected to the 2025 class of AIAA Fellows, an honor given to individuals in recognition of their notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sciences or technology of aeronautics and astronautics.

Álvaro Martínez-Sánchez, Gonzalo Arranz, and Adrián Lozano-Durán were featured in Nature Communications’ list of the 50 most interesting papers in applied physics and mathematics for their paper “Decomposing causality into its synergistic, unique, and redundant components.”

PhD student Andrew Fishberg has been selected for the Nuclear Scholars Initiative, a program designed to offer exceptional graduate students and young professionals an opportunity to engage and collaborate with senior experts on nuclear weapons issues.

Nathanael Jenkins (APG) won second prize in the IMechE and NAFEMS UK Engineering Simulation Techniques: Outstanding Undergraduate Project Award for his undergraduate work on aircraft lightning strike simulations.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

As 2024 ends, I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the AeroAstro community for your dedication, engagement, and contributions to this year's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee and events.

Please take a moment to reflect on the valuable lessons learned this past year and join us as we continue advancing our inclusion and engagement efforts in 2025.

On behalf of the DEI Committee, I would also like to express our deep appreciation to AeroAstro's 2023-2024 Diversity Scholars, Kristen Ammons and Menna Hussein, and to admin Echo Aodhan, for their exceptional leadership and unwavering commitment to fostering a welcoming and engaging community. Additionally, I would like to recognize Menna and Kristen's work spearheading the GAAP Leadership Program, along with Rosemary Davis, Annick Dewald, and the GAAP Mentors.

Wishing you a joyful holiday season and looking forward to continuing our meaningful work together in the New Year!

With gratitude,

Denise Phillips, Diversity Officer

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Apply to be a Diversity Scholar

AeroAstro is now accepting applications for one of our 2025 Diversity Scholars positions.

Diversity Scholars must be currently enrolled as PhD students and have demonstrated passion and commitment to improving and advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the AeroAstro community. This role covers expenses equivalent to those covered by a half-RA for one academic year.

Please submit your application materials to Denise Phillips, dap1@mit.edu by January 6, 2025.

More information:

Highlights

The Computational Turbulence Group attended the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Prof. Carmen Guerra-Garcia co-authored the AIAA 2024 Aerospace America Year in Review for the Plasmadynamics and Lasers section.

PhD student William Parker’s research was featured on both SpaceNews and Gizmodo, exploring the impact of this year’s geomagnetic storms that led to unprecedented “mass migrations” of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit.

The MIT Motorsports team said goodbye to MY20, their 2019–2021 vehicle, during a shop cleaning day. Good luck to all the course 16 members gearing up for the spring race in a brand new vehicle – and special thanks to Isaiah Villarreal ‘27 for the tour! And remember: always wear proper PPE!

CommLab

The AeroAstro Comm Lab provides 1-1 peer coaching sessions for all forms of technical communication. Make an appointment today to improve the effectiveness of your next paper, poster, presentation and more!

New Fellow Recruitment

The AeroAstro Comm Lab is seeking new Fellows with a wide diversity of skills to join our team this spring! AeroAstro-affiliated graduate students and postdocs, including international students, who plan to be at MIT through at least Spring 2025 are encouraged to apply to be a Communication Fellow. This paid (up to $3,000/year!) position is a great way to help your peers and to develop your own communication skills.

You do not need to already be an expert in technical communication to apply. This is a great professional development opportunity through training, mentoring, resource creation, teaching, and more. Applications open at the end of December and close in early February. Please see our website for more information and the application.

Check out our new digital resources!

Upcoming Workshops:

Website Workshop

Thursday, 1/16, 12-1:30pm

Master’s Thesis Workshop

Tuesday, 1/28, 12-1:30pm

RSVP for the Masters Thesis workshop here

Research

ACDL

Informative and non-informative decomposition of turbulent flow fields | PhD student Gonzalo Arranz and Prof. Adrian Lozano-Durán present a method to decompose a flow into two components: an informative component that contains all the information of a given target flow of interest, and a residual component that contains no information of the target flow.

APG

Numerical investigation of the bridging and current flow of a positive DC streamer using a 1.5D model | PhD student Lee Strobel and Prof. Carmen Guerra-Garcia outline the development of a reduced-order numerical model of a DC streamer discharge that is able to predict the streamer bridging phase and current pulse.

Do you have highlights to include in future editions of the

Monthly Roundup?

Send them to aa-communications@mit.edu.