Three aerospace students earn major Defense fellowships
Three Â鶹ÊÓƵ aerospace PhD students have earned prestigious 2024 (NDSEG) Fellowships.
Vicki Hurd, Sarah Kinney, and Ryan Menges have each been awarded the Department of Defense honor, which provides three year fellowships to promising young scientists and engineers.
The program, established by Congress in 1989, provides fellowships to up to 500 people across the United States annually and is designed to promote education in science and engineering disciplines relevant to the Department of Defense.
Find out more about our honorees and their research below.
Vicki Hurd
3rd Year PhD Student
Advisor: Allie Hayman
Lab: Bioastronautics Lab
My research will develop venous gas emboli (VGE) detection algorithms and characterize the impact of signal degradation and motion artifacts on detector performance to establish the foundation for a wearable ultrasound extravehicular activity (EVA) VGE monitor. It is currently unknown how VGE form over time and relate to the onset of decompression sickness. Recent advances in ultrasound transducers could enable long-term, continuous monitoring, transforming our understanding of decompression sickness and providing a means to monitor astronaut VGE levels during EVA. This will be critical as future exploration missions emphasize increased EVA frequency, duration, and number of transitions between pressurized environments. I will develop and validate sound-based and image-based ultrasound VGE detection algorithms and generate novel performance metrics for each, establish algorithmic means of synthesizing decompression sickness data, characterize algorithm performance under degraded signal conditions, and assess how motion artifacts influence VGE detection abilities. Autonomous detection of VGE levels in the circulatory system via wearable ultrasound would prove monumental in the foundational understanding of decompression sickness and would serve as a direct strategy to predict and mitigate decompression sickness during surface EVA.
Hurd is a 2024 awardee of both the NDSEG and a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) fellowowship. Program rules allow honorees to receive only one. She has chosen the NSTGRO.
Sarah Kinney
1st Year PhD Student
Advisors: Iain Boyd and John Evans
Labs: Nonequilibrium Gas and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory (NGPDL) and Computational Mechanics and Geometry Laboratory (CMGLab)
Aerodynamic heating is a critical design challenge for hypersonic vehicles due to the complex relationships between material ablation and chemical kinetics, which significantly impacts fluid dynamics. These complex relationships make modeling and predicting aerodynamic heating and flow separation in hypersonic conditions particularly difficult. Reproducing these conditions in wind tunnels is often impractical or prohibitively expensive, and flight tests are even more costly. As a result, hypersonic vehicle testing is often limited to wind tunnel experiments with limited fidelity and scope. My research aims to develop a reduced-order model that accounts for tunnel facility noise and other fluid-structure interactions in hypersonic environments. The goal of this model is to integrate data from lower fidelity hypersonic tests, providing a more cost-effective approach to correlating these results with those from higher fidelity tests. Ultimately, this work seeks to enhance the accuracy and affordability of hypersonic vehicle testing and development. Photo Credit: Leighton Jack
Ryan Menges
1st Year PhD Student
Advisor: Daniel Scheeres
Lab:
Ryan Menges is a first-year PhD student working with Dr. Daniel Scheeres in the Celestial Spaceflight Mechanics Lab (CSML). His research lies at the intersection of dynamical systems theory and spacecraft navigation. In his current work, he is developing semi-analytical methods for spacecraft state propagation and navigation in cislunar space utilizing high-fidelity dynamical models. Ryan is particularly interested in enabling advanced spacecraft autonomy.