What’s your Next Adventure? 

In January, I’m headed to SpaceX in South Texas where I’m going to be an engineer in their Thermal Fluids and Life Support team for the crewed portion of Starship.

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

I’m excited that it’s such a big change from what I’ve been doing for so long. All my undergrad and graduate career and internships have all been centered around small, uncrewed spacecraft. I’ll be transitioning from that to a crewed spacecraft, which also happens to be the largest rocket ever built, so it’s a really big change and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of challenges that come along with that, so I think it will be a really cool experience.

I’m also excited to work on something that’s actually going to carry people to space and the moon, and that’s pretty awesome.

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

During my junior year of undergrad, I took eight months off of schoolwork and interned at NASA Marshall in Huntsville, Alabama. It was my first internship experience and my first real hardware experience. I worked on both ground support and testing small monopropellant thrusters for CubeSats using a new propellant to replace hydrazine, which is suppose to be less toxic and easier to work with.

Later, I interned at MIT Lincoln Lab for a summer and went back to MIT Lincoln Lab again before graduate school.

When I got to Tech, I joined the Space System’s Design Lab and worked with Dr. Glenn Lightsey where I spent my first two years of graduate school working on CubeSat propulsion systems, designing, building, testing, and delivering them to space.

When I started my research for my Ph.D, I was working on fluid positioning. So, when you have a CubeSat tank in space and you need to extract liquid propellant from the tank, or a gas, to send to a thruster, how do you know where the liquid and gas are sitting when there’s no gravity to control where the bubbles go? That’s been most of my research, moving fluids around in space. Now, I’m going to do a full-time job where I move fluids around in space, so it’s not that different.

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

During my undergraduate years, I was only focused on my schoolwork and wasn’t involved in any clubs, so I didn’t really have any of the skills that you’d gain out of those experiences. I had a little bit from internships, but that only takes you so far. I got involved in research towards the end and that helped me get into graduate school.

So, at Tech, I’ve spent years working on flight hardware and a lot of things I probably should have learned as an undergrad. That hardware experience has been invaluable to me and allowed me to work with JPL and other NASA folks, and really grow as an engineer.

There are a lot of things I thought I knew when I started here, but looking back I can say I certainly didn’t know. So, I think spending all this time doing actual research and working with other grad students as well as faculty really helped me to grow into somebody that can look a little more critically at things and accept that there’s a lot left to learn.

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

Start early. I didn’t and I should have. A lot of the things that were so great about Georgia Tech, like getting to work on flight hardware and all this stuff is also available to undergraduates. I see undergrads in their second year here who are doing all the same stuff as me. They’re getting that hands on experience. They’re in charge of flight hardware and sending things to space.

Join clubs. I think joining clubs is super valuable too. The things you learn from actually building stuff as opposed to taking classes and doing math about the stuff you might build are highly valuable. There’s a lot of skill you don’t pick up unless you go and do it.

If you’re interested in grad school, talking to some grad students is the first move anyone should make. Luckily, I had a lot of great graduate mentors, both when I was an undergrad and as a grad student who guided me along the way.