This page summarizes all of my professional work experience; for a list of skills see the Education page.

Advanced Space

Astrodynamics Intern, Summer 2021

My work at advanced space is about developing neural networks for astrodynamics applications.

Aerospace Corporation

Astrodynamics Intern, GEM Fellow, Summer 2020

During my summer in the astrodynamics department, I helped add additional functions to their HIFFLY C++ library, a high fidelity formation flight modeling tool. Additionally, I build an ephemerides concatenating tool.

Modeling and Simulation Intern, GEM Fellow, Summer 2019

While at the Aerospace Corporation, I helped on the HIVE project, an internal R&D project to develop a group of disaggregated, reconfigurable satellites. In collaboration with Tom Battista and Henry Helvajian, I developed a proximity operations model for a tug vehicle to carry the HIVE units to a desired orbit.

Additionally, I developed a front-end for a link budget tool, for government customers unfamiliar with satellite communications to create link budgets for their needs.

Blue Origin

Engineering Intern, Spring 2019

Due to the nature of the work at Blue Origin, I cannot speak about the work that I did in great detail. As an intern in the Advanced Development Programs Group, I aided in trajectory design as well as trajectory software development.

NanoRacks

Engineering Intern, Summer 2018

As one of the Matthew Isakowitz Fellows, I spent the summer working at NanoRacks in Houston, Texas. I worked directly under the Senior Aerospace Mechanical Engineer, Sam Wald, and Chief Technology Officer Mike Lewis.

My main project for the summer was designing and prototyping a 1.5U (15 cm by 10 cm by 10 cm) NanoLab for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Space Station Challenge. The purpose of this payload was to test the effectiveness of dental fillers that have been cured in space. The results of this experiment are important to determining how we approach dental health for long duration space exploration missions. For this project, I contacted dentists for more technical information on the science behind filling tooth cavities. I learned how to use several dental tools from one of the local dentists as well. When I had enough background information about the procedure, I  used SolidWorks to design the NanoLab. After several design review iterations, I moved onto ordering parts to test several components of the NanoLab. My work will be launching on SpaceX Commercial Resupply 16 in November 2018.

The Aerospace Corporation

Space Architecture Intern, Summer 2017

I was an intern in the Space Architecture Department in the Chantilly, Virginia during Summer 2017. In this role, I supported many different projects within the department. One of my largest projects was assessing NASA Goddard Space Flight Center projects. I assisted in developing an early warning metrics model to verify if the project would match the projections and finish on time and under budget. This project relied on a historical backlog of previous NASA missions and their costs and milestone efficiency. Then, using probability models and adding room for error, a projection could be made to see if the project was headed for delays or cost over run. Our work ended up predicting a project would delay 6 months before the delay occurred.  Another project I did was a report on Emerging SmallSat Launch vehicles. I provided analysis on which companies were the most promising by the funding, business plan, and current. technology readiness level. Additionally, I built a web scraping tool to auto-update the Launch Vehicle Database, so the results could stay up to date. This work resulted in a new, three-year contract with the National Reconnaissance Office.

Aerial Transportation Research 

August 2017 – May 2018

I was an individual researcher to Professor Dengfeng Sun. My work focused on the relationship between flight departure delays and weather patterns by using data from the FAA’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics and NOAA’s weather database. In this role, I developed a probability model to calculate the likelihood of delay based on varying factors. The findings supported previous claims about how factors like weekdays, airports, and airlines can have an adverse effect on delay. My work was presented at the Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference and the AIAA Region III Student Conference.

Flight Dynamics and Control/Hybrid Systems Lab

January 2018 – May 2018

I worked as a research assistant for the IARC Aerial Robotics project with Professor Hwang’s lab. The purpose of the research was to develop a vehicle platform that could utilize Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms to navigate. I was tasked with developing the software that adds the wifi Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) sensing into the overall mapping interface. To do this, I used the ROS framework but I also added a supplementary algorithm in Python.

Space Flight Projects Laboratory

August 2018 – December 2018

I am working as a research assistant in the Space Flight Projects Lab on research for the Next Mars Orbiter (NEMO) mission. The NEMO mission proposes a sample return from Mars, which has never been done before. My part of the research is providing the supplementary sensor analysis for Passively Safe Rendezvous Orbits. I utilized image processing to obtain the relative distance by using the MATLAB Image Processing Toolbox. More information about my research can be found within the same subsection title on the Professional Materials page: here.