NASA

As a software engineering intern in a NASA-affiliated aeronautics research program, I engineered the simulation and control software for a 1:10 scale wind-tunnel system used to study biomimetic airfoils — wing geometries inspired by the flight surfaces of birds and insects. The work sat at the intersection of software, embedded systems, and experimental aerodynamics.

I integrated PCB design, CAD modeling, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) pipelines into a single reproducible workflow, iterating on airfoil geometry and control strategy until the biomimetic design achieved an 18% improvement in lift-to-drag ratio over the baseline. On the data side, I built a Python-based aerodynamic data-science and processing pipeline using NumPy, OpenCV, Pandas, and Matplotlib to analyze Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) turbulence data, producing AI-ready datasets and pipelines for model training and validation.

The research culminated in three technical reports — featured in the AREN 2023 Annual Report — and I presented the findings to an audience of 200+ researchers at the NASA GLOBE Symposium. This work also seeded two of my later peer-reviewed publications on biomimetic airfoil optimization and background-oriented Schlieren imaging.