This year, I am a research team lead for the Hume Center. We are partnered with Northrop Grumman's SpaceLogistics division, focusing on designing On-Orbit Attacable Components (OACs).

I am a test engineer for the R&D subteam, meaning that I am responsible for designing and running test experiments as OLVT tries to become the first collegiate team to deliver a payload to LEO (low earth orbit). I also work on developing new technologies for future rockets, including tip-to-tip carbon fiber wrapping, epoxy fin fileting, and working on the logistics of a two-stage hot staged rocket.

Virginia Tech has rebranded the Residential Advisor (RA) role to the Student Leader (SL) position. The Student Leader model has three roles: Well-Being, Inclusion and Belonging, and ExperienceVT. I am an ExperienceVT SL. In this position, I am responsible for getting to know my residents (~150) and make sure that everyone is able to get to know other groups on campus and become involved in the Virginia Tech community. As a result, I invite my residents to new events each week to show the scope of what Virginia Tech has to offer. Additionally, I plan an event myself each month that fosters bonding among students within the whole residential building (I'm in Hoge Hall, the engineers' dorm). Some examples of in-house events are NFL game day watches, resume reviews, or organizing a volleyball tournament. Besides these roles, I also have the same duties as a traditional RA; I perform rounds and resolve disputes among my residents.

As the treasurer for the Archimedes Society, I have sourced ~$1750 worth of material funding and $4000 worth of travel expenses for the Archimedes subteams. These three design teams are freshman only and are tailored to different majors. I am also an advisor for Team ASTRA, teaching the current members technical skills and reviewing documents.Team ASTRA is an aerospace focused team that competes in the NASA Micro-G NExT Competition every year. This is the most popular design team. Students spend the year researching, designing, and building a response to the prompt. In early June, the team gets to fly to Houston to test their device in person at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory and tour the Johnson Space Center. Past projects include a spacesuit cooling system, a lunar regolith sample collection device, and a camera mount for the ISS. I am also an advisor for the ASTRA, providing technical advice and managing team conflicts.Team Infinitum is tailored towards CS majors. The Infinitum teams compete in the Microsoft Imagine Cup, learning how to apply programming languages and how to integrate front-end and backend together to make a final cohesive project. Past projects include an app to reduce food waste in residential and restaurant kitchens and a model to monitor beehive health.Team Juvo is usually the most cross-disciplinary group. This team competes in the Source America Design Challenge. This is aimed at helping people in our communities with disabilities. This team has been one of the most successful, winning runners-up twice in the past and once winning People's Choice. Past projects include a pencil grip, and computer mouse design specifically tailored for individuals with impaired motor control.

Team ASTRA is an all-freshman design team at Virginia Tech under the Archimedes Society that competes in the annual NASA Micro-G NExT Competition. In the 2022-23 school year, I worked in a team of 7 to design and produce a spacesuit cooling system. This system was to be designed to be used in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston so that astronauts could more effectively train with a self-contained cooling system.I spent the first semester of the year brainstorming and researching various cooling methods that could work under the imposed constraints of the challenge. I also assisted in some of the CAD modeling. The first semester culminated in a Preliminary Design Review that was sent to NASA to be approved.After moving on to the second phase of the challenge, I worked on designing an exterior housing unit for the chiller so that it would be waterproof. I started iterating through what I knew of the design process and learning through trial and error. Starting off at a small-scale box design, I cut out ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene, UHMWPE, using a bandsaw and sealed the edges with epoxy. A gasket was added to the rim of the lid to try to form a watertight seal via experimentation with the CNC milling machine. When the clamps and epoxy failed on this version of the device, I designed a dovetail edge joint to give more surface area for the epoxy to adhere to. This required me to change to a laser cutter in order to achieve more complicated cuts of the UHMWPE. During this stage, a prototype was developed without the lid design to identify where the failure point was. Finally, clamps were added by running threaded rods through the box to reduce the moment the previous ones were causing.Upon completion of the box, it was joined with a commercial chiller, and I flew down to Houston to test the device in person. My team's design successfully cooled water and won the competition. A brief report was then drafted on the team's overall design and experience.

As a student in the NASA L'SPACE Mission Concept Academy, I worked with a group of 12 students to design a robotic mission to Ceres. The goal of my team's mission was to explore the Haulani Crater and investigate underground oceans for composition and gain insight into how Ceres formed. Throughout this academy, I heard from various NASA speakers and had the opportunity to develop my technical skills in areas such as thermal requirements and project management.My role on the team was as the Deputy Project Manager of Resources. As one of the leadership personnel for my team, I helped organize deliverables behind the scenes as well as leading my own sub team, programmatics. I was responsible for developing the mission schedule, budget, risks, and outreach. I spent a consider amount of time learning how to use the NASA Instrument Cost Model and researching analogous missions to get estimates of price and timelines. I developed a $300 million budget and 14-year Gantt chart during my time at the academy while receiving guidance from NASA mentors. This required a great amount of communication across sub teams and an enormous effort on the part of the entire team to finish the academy with a professional level Preliminary Design Review. Please take a look at my team's final project to get a sense of the mission and our accomplishments over the summer.

For the duration of this project, I worked under Dr. Sevak, an ESM professor and researcher to conduct a study of how fin shape allows unpowered boats to move in the water. I also worked with fellow student, Kevin Xu, on this project. During the first couple weeks of the summer, I designed and built a wave generator using an Arduino and CAD modeling. I was able to transform the rotational motion into a vertical oscillation to make consistent waves to test our boats in. I also wrote the code for the Arduino. The boats were simulated by using 2"x4" foam boards and fins were stuck into the bottom of the boat. I worked to experiment with how to control the boats' path, eventually settling on a bobby pin attached to a guide wire. To reduce the effect of waves bouncing off the walls, mock lane lines were added. The fins were mostly made out of plastic and varied from 0.13 to 1.37mm in thickness. We also tested for different fin lengths (2",4") at various angles (10,20,30,60). We were able to run about 150 trials by the end of the summer, and successfully demonstrated that certain fins performed well above the rest. The results of this research are briefly summarized in a paper.

I worked in the Virginia Tech Center of Soft Matter and Biological Physics over the summer doing research in population dynamics under Dr. Uwe Tauber. I started off by learning basic stochastic models and experimenting with Lotka-Volterra. I also spent a couple weeks learning how to use C++. The models for this position work by randomly distributing particles and having random interactions occur at set probabilities. In the case of the simplest Lotka-Volterra model, there is a prey species that has a birth probability and a predator species with death and predation probabilities. Predators reproduce by the predation reaction. The simulation then runs for a number of Monte Carlo time steps. We are looking to see the final state of the system: single extinction, joint extinction, or coexistence. The coexistence region is the most interesting for analogous biological models.After I successfully replicated some past results with the Lotka-Volterra model, I shifted my attention towards the May-Leonard Rock-Paper-Scissors model. In this system, there are three species that predate each other in a cyclical fashion. Hence the name, Rock-Paper-Scissors. From past research, it was determined that there is only a coexistence region when the three species all have the same reaction probabilities for birth, death, and predation. There is also the option of adding two other reactions, diffusion and swapping, that allow for movement in the simulation. I was able to add a parent-based evolution model to this May-Leonard system that allowed for the species to evolve into a coexistence even if they started off at different reaction rates. As far as my professor knows, this had not been found before, so it promises interesting results for the future of the biological physics world. This simulation was carried out in C++, but at very few iterations. More simulations should be run to determine the validity of the results and find an average for the evolution convergence criterion.

Worked in a group of 8 researchers to provide a feasibility study for Northrop Grumman on space logistics. In the first semester, we spent notable about of time researching L4/L5 communication/astronomy applications and using radio based phased arrays in GEO to track ICBMs, SLBMs, and hypersonic missiles. After running into issues with classified information, we switched to a new project idea.In the second semester, we built off of Northrop Grumman's SpaceLogistics team, and we designed a geosynchronous satellite servicing system to be used in conjunction with Northrop's MRVs and MARVs. The idea behind the system is that current satellites become unusable or heavily incapacitated if they run out of fuel or have a component break. Under the newly designed servicing station, Project METEOR, these satellites can be refueled and repaired to have longer lifetimes. This would also have the added benefit of reducing manufacturing costs because satellites could be made to be repaired. I also worked on a cost estimate for orbital maneuvers of MRVs to see if the servicing station was effective. Our initial estimates show that the station can become profitable if there are 3 or more MRVs in orbit. We finished the project by presenting at the 2023 HUME Colloquium and drafting a white paper for Northrop Grumman.

I attended the Student Engineers' Council general body meetings and submitted two funding reports in order to support conference trip expenses and L1 rocketry certifications for 20 members.

Further developed team working and communication skills in the busy downtown Fredericksburg location. Worked near full time hours each week throughout the summer.