AE Seminar

Digital Engineering for Transformative Aerospace

Featuring

Olivia Fischer

Principal Research Engineer, Georgia Tech

Thursday, February 12

11:00 a.m.

Guggenheim 442

About the Seminar:

Engineering the next generation of aerospace systems requires a fundamental shift in how complex systems are conceived, designed, produced, and sustained. Meeting this challenge demands moving from document-centric practices, characterized by fragmented information exchange and limited traceability, to model-centric, digitally connected approaches in which stakeholders collaborate through interoperable models spanning disciplines, domains, and lifecycle phases.

This seminar presents research enabling this transformation. The first part introduces the development of digital threads that establish end-to-end traceability across the system lifecycle. The second part examines digital twins, their foundational constructs, their role in sustainment and contested logistics operations, and their application at the enterprise level through collaborations with industry and NASA on institutional management and enterprise modeling. The third part explores AI-enabled methods for systems engineering, including domain-specific language models for requirements engineering that demonstrate significant improvements over general-purpose approaches.

The seminar concludes with contributions to foundational definitions and reference models developed through professional leadership in AIAA and other organizations, work that is shaping how industry and government implement digital engineering.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Olivia Pinon Fischer is a Principal Research Engineer in the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she serves as Chief of the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory's Digital Engineering Division. In this role, she leads pivotal research efforts in close collaboration with industry and government experts, bringing together advancements in modeling, data management, and analytical capabilities to address challenges in complex engineering systems and systems-of-systems. She manages multi-disciplinary research teams working across digital engineering, digital twins, digital thread, digital ecosystems, model-based systems engineering, and ML/AI.

Dr. Pinon Fischer's expertise has been recognized through numerous honors and appointments. She is an alumnus of the National Academy of Engineering's US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium and received the 2024 Georgia Tech EVPR Institute Research Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Impact. That same year, she was selected as a Boeing Visiting Professor, spending part of the summer engaging with Boeing experts on AI and digital engineering. She also served on the National Academies Consensus Study on Digital Transformation for the Department of the Air Force, released in December 2025.

An Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Dr. Pinon Fischer currently chairs AIAA's Digital Engineering Integration Committee and leads AIAA’s Transformative Engineering of Systems Task Force. Internationally, she recently served as Co-Chair of the NATO STO AVT-407 System Qualification and Certification by Analysis Technical Activity and now leads the Strategy group under NATO AVT-ET-259. She is also a member of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences Programme Committee and an invited member of NAFEMS' Engineering Data Science Working Group.

Dr. Pinon Fischer holds degrees across various engineering disciplines and earned her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech.