What is your next adventure?

I’ll be reporting to the United States Military Academy at West Point to serve as a physics and aerospace engineering professor.

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

I’m looking forward to combining the operational experience I’ve had as an Army Officer with the robust educational and research experience that I’ve had here at Georgia Tech and then bring that into my classroom as an instructor to try to help develop the next generation of Army leaders. 

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

While I was in graduate school, I was a graduate research assistant (GRA) in the Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL) under Dr. Dimitri Mavris and while there I served as the project manager for the Valkyrie at Sands? For the versatile autonomous lifesaver in combat rescue environment. This research leveraged my military experience to work on the development of a medical evacuation vehicle that’s fully autonomous and both piloted and equipped with medical care for wounded troops in combat. I was able to work on this with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and that was a perfect intersection of my previous military experience. What I learned as a graduate student and then leveraged the capabilities of the ASDL to end state, build a product that has proven to be of tremendous value to DARPA. 

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

I was a physics major as an undergraduate student and was pretty apprehensive initially about going back to graduate school after being an Army officer for eight years. Georgia Tech’s program is known for being really rigorous and it’s a challenging institution, so coming in I was concerned because I had been out of the game for so long.

But I was able to be placed into an academic environment where it was really east to learn, I was able to work under some incredible research engineers in the ASDL, and then actually surpass what my initial academic expectations were going to be and be a real contributing member to real, actionable research. And for that it was just an incredible experience all around.

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

It’s ok to want to go work in industry and gain some relevant experience prior to going to graduate school. I think especially in engineering, we can feel this need of 'I need to go to graduate school immediately’, and hopefully my experience shows that even if you’ve been out of the academic seat for years, you can leverage that professional experience that you gain to then both be value-added in the classroom and lab.