What is your next adventure?

I'm going to be a post-doc at Centrale Supelec in France in the Department of Industrial Engineering, working with Adam Abdin. 

My work there will involve applying a lot of industrial engineering methodologies to space mission design, which is pretty similar to what I’m doing in Dr. Koki Ho’s lab here at Georgia Tech. His research approaches missions from the aerospace side—looking at what we can take from industrial engineering and make useful in that context. My new project flips that perspective. I’ll be going into an industrial engineering department and introducing aerospace concepts to that group, bringing in those topics from the other end.

What about your next adventure are you most looking forward to?

It’s going to be a really big learning experience, working outside of my home department. There are so many methods and so much theory that I’m excited to learn from my new colleagues.

Outside of work, I’m originally from the UK, so being in France will feel nice—just a little closer to home. I’m really looking forward to that as well. This past summer, I had the chance to visit the lab I’ll be joining when I went home to see my parents for a couple of weeks.

Did you have any previous co-op, internship, or research experience in this area?

I didn't have any internships, but I worked on an externally funded project for a couple of years. It was funded by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I was helping them implement more advanced optimization algorithms for their future mission design problems for a Mars mission. I planned and helped them optimize basically the mission concept at a very high level. What does the mission look like? Which systems are required and for which parts of the mission?

My research has primarily been with the Space Systems Optimization group within SSDL under Dr. Ho. 

How did your educational experience at Georgia Tech help you to achieve your goals?

One of the biggest things is the opportunities in terms of which graduate-level courses are available here. There are some great ones, especially the special topics courses where professors teach something that's very relevant to their research. Dr. Ho, for example, teaches an Introduction to Operations Research for Aerospace Engineers course. I was able to take that early on in my time here and that really helped me get up to speed in terms of research. The other thing educationally is, I don't know if this is for the entire College of Engineering, but for aerospace at least we have the minor math requirement. And that encouraged me to take a few classes that I don't think I would have considered otherwise, but I took a lot from those courses. They were extremely helpful in terms of just broadening my technical background and for my research.

What advice would you give to an underclassman who would like to follow the same path?

Starting and earning a Ph.D. can be overwhelming. It's important to try and not be overwhelmed and just accept that it's a huge thing. It's kind of a stereotype, but it’s not a linear path. There's going to be high highs and there's going to be low lows. There's going to be setbacks. There's going to be moments when you feel great and everything is going perfectly. There's going to be other times that you get funding rejections or paper rejections. You have to accept that it's a roller coaster. Have some faith that you're going to get to the other side of it. 

The other thing to do is take advantage of as many opportunities as you're presented with. Go to as many conferences as you're able to get travel funding for, present as much as possible, and publish as much of your work as you as you possibly can. Every opportunity that comes your way, try and take it.