The National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) fellowship process is highly competitive; any given engineering department may have only a few recipients in a given year. In March of 2024, the MAESTRO Lab found out that two of its own members had been selected. Undergraduate researcher Sarah Kinney and Ph.D. student Mason Ward were both granted support by the United States Air Force under this program. This brings the total number of current MAESTRO-affiliated NDSEG recipients to four (three under the Air Force, one under the Army).
Mason Ward and Sarah Kinney were granted support to study two very different problems. Mason will explore aircraft shape adaptivity for selective cross-section reduction while Sarah will explore more efficient modeling techniques for hypersonic aerodynamic phenomena.
Mason Ward joined MAESTRO as a Ph.D. student in the fall of 2023 after multiple years as an undergraduate research assistant and a term with the Mays School to complete an M.S. in Business. As a new Ph.D. student advised by Dr. Hartl, he accepted the Aerospace Engineering Department’s most prestigious internal fellowship. The NEXAS Fellowship guarantees full support and research freedom to its recipient and is intended to attract the most promising Ph.D. applicants to the department. Mason used this support and the first semester of his graduate studies to develop a detailed proposal toward “Fundamental Modeling and Analysis of Multifunctional Couplings Toward Reconfigurable Aerodynamic and Radar Responses in Aerospace Structures.” As he moves forward, Mason will forgo NEXAS Fellowship as he instead focuses on this effort with support from the US Air Force Research Laboratory.
Sarah Kinney has been an undergraduate research assistant in the MAESTRO Lab since the summer of 2020, largely focusing on new tools and methods for the assessment of aero-structural noise. Her work has been essential to the Morphing Aerostructures for Noise Reduction project from both the computational and experimental perspectives. Her winning NDSEG proposal was titled “Development of a Reduced Order Model for Facility Noise Effects on Hypersonic Laminar- Turbulent Transition“. After graduation in May 2024, Sarah will attend The University of Colorado Boulder where she plans to complete her Ph.D. as she leverages the skills learned in the MAESTRO Lab toward great technical depth in the area of hypersonics.
In addition to Mason and Sarah, other current NDSEG Fellows in the MAESTRO Lab include Kevin Lieb, who focuses on coupled high/low frequency structural adaptivity for aero-structural noise reduction, and Jessica Zamarripa, who studies novel liquid metal-augmented shape memory alloy structural circuits.