What was your greatest challenge & how you overcame it?

My Ph.D. research is about a new method for hypersonic trajectory control of Mars entry vehicles.  The greatest difficulty with this research was probably obtaining an equal comparison of this new method to the current state-of-the-art.

To overcome this, I thought a lot about the problem and the assumptions I was making. I then approached it from different sides, making several different types of comparisons, for several different trajectory objectives, to try and obtain as complete and fair of a comparison as possible.

If you could do it over, what would you do differently?

I think it would have been helpful to start my research with a more exhaustive literature review of my field to fully explore all the work that had been done, rather than doing this literature review while performing active research at the same time.

Describe a break-through moment in your research.

A break-through moment in my research was when I started obtaining optimal control solutions for the two hypersonic steering approaches I was comparing in my research. I found that the new proposed method for hypersonic steering provided improved flight performance over the current state-of-the-art (for example, offering higher parachute deploy altitudes), and these performance differences are a key result of my Ph.D. dissertation.

Any fun memories?

Some of the most fun memories during my time as a graduate student at Illinois have been dinners and outings with other graduate students in my lab, including Curtis Orchard, Reindeer Ranch, and canoeing on the Vermilion River.

 It has also been very fun traveling to conferences, especially with several other graduate students to the AAS Spaceflight Mechanics Meeting this past January in Kauai.

What's next for you in your career?

I will be starting in July as a trajectory optimization analyst at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California.

Parting thoughts?

It has been an incredible journey completing all three of my degrees in aerospace at Illinois! I will miss campus when I leave this May!