MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics | September 2025

Announcements

Tenure-track faculty search: AeroAstro invites applications for tenure-track faculty positions with a start date of July 1, 2026 or a mutually agreeable date thereafter. The department is conducting a search for exceptional candidates in any discipline related to aerospace engineering, broadly defined, though particular interests are in: (i) aircraft design, (ii) air traffic management, (iii) fluid dynamics and mechanics, and (iv) bioastronautics. Please visit MIT’s faculty search page for full position details and application instructions.

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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.

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Community Corner

Staff enjoyed a summer “Par-Tee” with a group outing to Puttshack! Congrats to our mini-golf champions — Marie, Denise, Rachael, and Jei Lee!

GA³ spent September hosting a series of events to warmly welcome our new Course 16 graduate students!

HR bits

Spot Awards: We recognize the outstanding contributions of Quentin Alexander, Douglas Purdy, Alexa Torres, Rachel Ornitz, Janine Liberty, Anthony Zolnik, Corrine Giordani, Pam Fradkin, Esther Allen, MaryAnn Carey, Karen Bruce, and Rachael Draper, who have all worked tirelessly through the summer to make a great fall semester possible! Have someone you would like to recognize? Submit a nomination any time!

Open Enrollment: MIT Benefits Open Enrollment for 2026 will take place October 14 through October 31, 2025. Watch for email reminders with details on how to review and update your elections.

AeroAstro job postings

October is Disability Employment Awareness Month! The MIT Disabilities Employee Resource Group (ERG) invites you to attend a series of events to explore this topic:

10/6: Making Inclusion and Accessibility Part of All Your Work – Rachel Tanenhaus, ADA Coordinator/Executive Director
10/15: Building Inclusive Workplace Practices: A talk with Laura Beretsky

Congratulations!

Prof. Jon How has been announced as the president-elect for the IEEE Control System Society. His term begins in January 2026.

Prof. Zachary Cordero and Florian Allroggen were selected to participate in the prestigious NAE Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering 2025 Symposium. Allroggen delivered a presentation on sustainable aerial mobility and Cordero attended as an invited participant.

Professor Emeritus Manuel Martinez-Sanchez was awarded the Stuhlinger Medal of Outstanding Achievement in Electric Propulsion for his tireless education of the next generation of electric propulsion engineers.

The MIT THERMOS (Translunar HEat Rejection and Mixing for Orbital Sustainability) team was awarded Third Place at NASA’s Human Lander Challenge in Huntsville, Alabama.

The student team from AeroAstro’s Space Resources Workshop is one of 13 winners in NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge. Their concept, CERBERUZ, advanced from over 200 submissions and earned funding to build a prototype in Phase 2.

Grad student Elizabeth Romero was selected as a 2025 Astronaut Scholar.

Arthur Brown, Haofeng Xu, Nicolas Gomez Vega, and former Prof. Steven Barrett were granted a full patent for their invention: multistaged ducted electroaerodynamic thrusters.

MIT’s Mason Estrada to sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers | The star pitcher has been studying aerospace engineering at MIT. Now his pitches, and career, will take flight in professional baseball.

Canan Dagdeviren, head of the Conformable Decoders research group and faculty lead of Women’s Health Program (WHx), and Prof. Dava Newman were awarded an Innovator Grant from the MIT HEALS Seed Grant program for their project, “Textile-based personalized ultrasound wearable device for continuous at-home breast monitoring.”

Prof. Andreea Bobu was awarded a seed grant from Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) program for her project proposing a framework that bridges the communication gaps between robots and human expectations.

CommLab

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

Check out our new digital resources:

Upcoming events:

Applying to Fellowships Workshop, Thurs. 10/3, 3:30pm
Master’s Thesis Kick-off Event, Thurs. 10/10, 1:00pm
Success at Conferences Workshop, Mon. 11/24, 12:00pm

Highlights

2025 Gardner Lecture: Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin: Watch the video of Dave Limp’s lecture, “Let’s Build the Road to Space.”

Prof. Youssef Marzouk has been appointed associate dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, where he will strengthen community among bilingual computing faculty and support those in joint appointments.

NASA selects Adam Fuhrmann ’11 for astronaut training | The AeroAstro alumnus is a test pilot and one of 10 new astronaut candidates selected from around the nation.

ARCLab researchers William Parker, Matthew Brown, and Professor Richard Linares have adapted their recent paper, “Greenhouse gases reduce the satellite carrying capacity of low Earth orbit,” for Science Journal for Kids, a publication that aims to make scientific research discoveries more accessible to a younger audience.

Teamwork in motion | AeroAstro graduate students, alumni, and friends ran the 2025 Ragnar Road Reach the Beach relay in two friendly yet competitive teams of 12, aptly named Team Aero and Team Astro.

Course 16 hosted two First Year Pre-Orientation Programs (FPOP) this year for potential new undergrads: the classic Discover Aerospace and Aerospace in Extended Reality (XR), introducing students to the possibilities of applying XR technologies in aerospace engineering.

On the joys of being head of house at McCormick Hall | Prof. Raul Radovitzky and Flavia Cardarelli reflect on a decade of telling bad dad jokes, learning Taylor Swift songs, and sharing a home with hundreds of students.

The DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration has selected MIT to lead a new research center on predictive simulation of extreme environments, with Profs. Ian Waitz, Youssef Marzouk, and Raul Radovitzky as co-PIs alongside faculty from other departments.

PhD student Claire Buffington successfully launched a high-altitude balloon to 74,400 feet as a proof of concept for MIT’s Morning Star Missions to Venus.

Leaders from industry, academia, and government gathered at The Aerospace Corporation for the third Workshop on Materials Challenges in Reusable Rocket Engines, led by Prof. Zack Cordero and colleagues.

Team Space Enabled hosted over 150 middle school students and their mentors for an educational program based on Zero Robotics.

ARCLAB has announced the winners of the 2025 MIT ARCLab Prize for AI Innovation in Space, a global challenge that invited teams to advance forecasting of thermospheric density, a critical factor in predicting satellite drag in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

Grad student Subham Saha reflected on “Memories, Monuments, and the Magic of a City at Night” for the MIT Grad Blog.

Undergrad Garrett Siemen captured the shadow of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, during its rare “shadow transit season” in September – a phenomenon that occurs only once every 15 years. Anyone interested in joining Garrett for stargazing and astrophotography adventures can email him at gsiemen@mit.edu.

Prof. Raúl Radovitzky shared his journey from Argentina to Cambridge with “The World at MIT." Watch the video to learn how he became a pioneer in aerospace and education.

Grad student Abby Lee is setting her sights on breaking a Guinness World Record by becoming the youngest woman to compete in an Ironman triathlon on all six inhabited continents. Watch this video to learn more about her journey!

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Best practices:

The need to belong: New meta-analysis highlights the importance of a “sense of belonging”

Celebrate N ational Hispanic American Heritage Month! Observed from September 15 through October 15, this month honors the histories, cultures, and contributions of Hispanic and Latine Americans.

Join the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee

The DEI Committee works to improve our department culture by listening, gathering feedback, and sharing updates and actions. If you’d like to continue your service on the committee or join as a new member, please complete the interest form by October 10, 2025. Meetings are open to the entire AeroAstro community.

Meeting schedule, 33-116 and on Zoom:

Kickoff Meeting: Thursday, October 7, 2025, 1:00-2:00 PM
Thursday, November 7, 2025, 1:30-2:30 PM
Thursday, December 4, 2025, 1:30-2:30 PM

Lunch will be served. Access the Zoom link here.

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of diversity, equity and inclusion?

Research

APG

Imaging of dynamic plasma-combustion interactions through a transparent electrode | Graduate student Colin Pavan and Prof. Carmen Guerra-Garcia use novel transparent electrode technology to image the interactions between a combustion flame and plasma.

ARCLab

BEAVR: Bimanual, multi-embodiment, accessible, virtual reality teleoperation system for robots | Researchers created a robotic teleoperation and learning software for controlling robots, recording datasets, and training physical AI models.

CSAIL

A new way to edit or generate images | MIT researchers found that special kinds of neural networks, called encoders or “tokenizers,” can do much more than previously realized.

EAPS

Study finds exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e is unlikely to have a Venus or Mars-like atmosphere | New research using the James Webb Telescope rules out possible atmospheric conditions of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e.

Planets without water could still produce certain liquids, a new study finds | Lab experiments show “ionic liquids” can form through common planetary processes and might be capable of supporting life even on waterless planets.

Interactive Robotics Group

New tool gives anyone the ability to train a robot | MIT engineers designed a versatile interface that allows users to teach robots new skills in intuitive ways.

REALM

This “smart coach” helps LLMs switch between text and code | The CodeSteer system could boost large language models’ accuracy when solving complex problems, such as scheduling shipments in a supply chain.

SPARK Lab

VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM optimized on the SL(4) manifold | Researchers built a new mapping system that can create 3D maps from regular video footage using a method that accounts for possible distortions when stitching map pieces together.

In the Media

Bloomberg Wall St. Week | SpaceX Starlink Dominates as Low Earth Orbit Satellite Race Intensifies | Prof.Kerri Cahoy sat down with David Westin to offer her perspective on the rapidly changing satellite landscape and what’s next for space technology.

ABC News | SpaceX's Starship faces 10th test after previous flights end in explosions | "We now have serious questions whether the architecture of Starship is in fact feasible or not," said Prof. Olivier de Weck.

CBC | Canada needs agency to manage public UFO sightings, says new federal report | "Everyone loves the idea of searching for UFOs or UAPs," said Prof. Sara Seager “Taking that into a way to educate people about misinformation, about challenging your own assumptions ... I had never thought of the field in those terms before.”

Nature | NASA’s Earth-observing satellites are crucial — commercial missions cannot replace them | Prof. Danielle Wood outlines the need for both public and commercial satellite missions to better understand and protect the environment.

Associated Press | How a ship that glides like a pelican could change travel and defense | AeroAstro alumni Billy Thalheimer and Michael Klinker’s company REGENT is testing a new type of winged passenger ferry on Narragansett Bay.

Fortune | How Boeing is quietly betting on a ‘brilliant’ 39-year old engineer—and setting the stage for a turnaround | Boeing has named alum Brian Yutko PhD ’14 chief of commercial airplanes product development at Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

Do you have highlights to include in future editions of the

Monthly Roundup?

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