AAE junior Bridget Cavanaugh is spending her summer on co-op at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.

AAE graduate student Gayathri Shivkumar won the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) Student Paper Award at the 44th International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS 2017). The award acknowledges outstanding student contributions and encourages greater student participation as principal or sole authors of papers.

AAE alumnus Frank Bauer (BSAAE ’79, MSAAE ’80) has been awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. Bauer was recognized for “distinguished public service in enabling the enhanced use of the Global Positioning System for satellites by NASA and the United States.”

Purdue AAE alumnae Loral O'Hara (MSAAE '09) has been selected for the 2017 NASA Astronaut Class. O'Hara is one of five women and seven men selected from a record number of applicants. The new astronauts must complete two years of intensive training at the Johnson Space Center before they will be qualified for assignment to future space missions.

Purdue AAE students participated in the Boeing-sponsored Aerospace Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering (AerosPACE) program over the 2016-2017 academic year. Teaming up with engineering students at five other U.S. universities, they designed, built, and flew a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or “drone” aircraft.

The Aviation Research Division of the Federal Aviation Administration has chosen Aeronautics and Astronautics (AAE) graduate student Tejas Pant for its Center of Excellence Summer Experience program. Pant will work as full-time graduate researcher at the William J. Hughes FAA Technical Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey over the summer.

Six AAE students have earned the opportunity to test their design skills at the NASA Micro-g Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Teams program – Micro-g NExT – activity in Houston May 24-26, 2017. The Purdue team spent the past two semesters developing a tool to anchor an astronaut to the surface of an asteroid.

AAE Prof. Wayne Chen has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Technology by Tampere University of Technology (TUT) in Finland “in recognition of significant contributions to the research of the behaviour of high deformation rates in materials as well as long-standing collaboration in research and technological development in the field of materials science.”

Emily (Birkhauser) Terrell graduated with a BSAAE in 2000. After working for Boeing for a little more than a year, she decided to go to law school. Emily currently works as an attorney in Washington, D.C., representing companies in technology-related fields.

Benjamin Vernhes is the recipient of the 2017 Herbert F. Rogers Award. The honor is given annually to a senior who is “deemed the most worthy and deserving as determined by her/his contributions to the growth of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in fostering engineering as an academic discipline.”