Ph.D. Student, UCLA Team, NDSEG Fellow

McKenna is a fifth year student, a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellow, and a member of the electrospray computational team. She uses Python to simulate droplet dynamics in the electrospray plume. She received her B.S. in physics and mathematics, with a minor in business, from Rhodes College in 2018. Email, Linkedin

Ph.D. Student, UCLA Team, NASA Space Technology Research Fellow

Mary is a fifth year graduate student working on the plasma side of PSPL under a NASA Space Research and Technology fellowship. She received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering in 2019 from UC San Diego. She interned with JPL’s Electric Propulsion group, where she worked to develop non-invasive diagnostics to be applied to a Hall Thruster. Her current research funded by the NSTRF is to develop a fast optical emission spectroscopy system for time-resolved, non-invasive diagnostics of a plasma device. Email, Linkedin

Ph.D. Student, UCLA Team

Graeme Sabiston received his B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc degrees in Engineering Physics, and Mechanical & Materials Engineering, respectively, from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is currently a Ph.D Candidate in the Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA, studying plasma-material interactions and space propulsion technology. He has previously been involved in topology optimization research for metal additive manufacturing processes, served as visiting scientist for Pratt and Whitney, and completed photonics research at Canada’s National Research Council. He was an R&D engineer and Flight Test Director at Pivotal Aerospace (previously Opener Inc), developing electric-vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Email, LinkedIn

Ph.D. Student, UCLA Team

Nicolas completed his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and Physics with a minor in Mathematics at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 2015, and his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2017 while being a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Subsequently, Nicolas was hired at The Aerospace Corporation as a Propulsion Test Engineer in the Electric Propulsion & Plasma Science group where he supports EMI/EMC compliance and RF (multipactor) component testing. Now, Nicolas is now also an Aerospace Fellow and is in his first year of doctoral work where his research focus is on the connection between the electromagnetic radiated emissions that emanate from a plasma and the plasma processes that created those emissions. LinkedIn

Ph.D. Student, OSU Team

Blake is a fourth year graduate student in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department at OSU. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2020 with a B.S. in Physics. He previously worked at Thorlabs Crystalline Solutions (formerly Crystalline Mirror Solutions), where he helped develop the automation of their optical ring down system. His current efforts are focused on the development of cold atmospheric plasma generation for medical applications. In his free time, Blake enjoys board games and playing guitar.Email

Ph.D. Student, UCLA Team

Patrick is an aerospace engineering Ph.D. student and has been with the research group since 2020. His research interests include air-breathing electric spacecraft propulsion, RF ion thrusters, and ion propulsion miniaturization. Previously, Patrick was employed at Ibeos as a Power Systems R&D intern where he developed a system to characterize spacecraft battery degradation and performed stress testing on smallsat power processing hardware. Patrick received a B.S. in aerospace engineering and a B.A. in physics from Virginia Tech in 2020. Email

Ph.D. Student, OSU Team

Rich is a PhD student in Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been working with the research group since 2019. His primary interest is in modeling plasma physics as related to high-energy electric propulsion systems; he has also worked with cold atmospheric plasmas in various applications. He is currently working under a fellowship from the UCLA SEAS Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Prior to obtaining his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering in 2021, Rich had extensive experience working in various industries as a systems analyst and administrator. His background has focused primarily on information and data management, including acting as data broker and statistician on over a dozen medical research papers. He has led international projects involving users and technical staff from multiple countries, often acting as the liaison between technical and non-technical personnel. ORCID, Google Scholar , LinkedIn, Email

Ph.D. Student, OSU Team

Christopher Cretel (US citizen) graduated with a B.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington in 2016. He worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the MOCHI lab building plasma diagnostics. After graduation, Christopher worked as the Propulsion Engineer for Phase Four from 2016-2023 during which time he led the development and productization of the RF plasma thruster with more than 10 systems launched and operated in space. Chris received his M.S. in Astronautical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2020. In Fall 2022, Christopher joined the Wirz Research Group studying advanced electric propulsion. His research interests include radio-frequency plasma discharges, modeling energetic particle interactions in the thruster near field region, and advancing machine learning use cases in aerospace. Email

Ph.D. Student, OSU Team

Ryan is a 2nd year graduate student with Oregon State University's College of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and minor in Aerospace Engineering at Oregon State University, and joined the Wirz Research Group in 2022. His primary interests focus on plasma-material interactions and design of electric propulsion devices for future NASA mission applications.Email

Graduate Student, OSU Team

Luke Franz is a Ph.D. researcher in the field of plasma-material interactions (PMI). His work focuses on informing the design and optimization of electric propulsion testing facilities and volumetrically complex materials (VCMs) through computational PMI modeling. Luke holds a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering with a minor in aerospace engineering from Oregon State University, where he led the two-stage High-Altitude Rocket Team. Email

Graduate Student, OSU Team

Ian is a first-year Ph.D. student in the department of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from OSU in 2023. His current research interests are focused on plasma-material interactions, and using Matlab and Labview to help carry out experiments in the lab. LinkedIn, Email

Graduate Student, OSU Team

Tanner is a 1st-year graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at OSU. He received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Aerospace Engineering from OSU in 2023. His current research focus is on optical emission spectrometry and plasma diagnostics. Email

Graduate Student, OSU Team

Mo is a first year Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University. Prior to OSU, he gained valuable Electric Propulsion experience in the aerospace industry with Ion and Hall Thrusters. At his most recent role as a Propulsion Engineer at ExoTerra Resource, he was responsible for the design and testing of flight Hall Thrusters and improved the performance of the thruster by 10%. He graduated with his B.S. degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University. At Cornell, he was a member of ASTRAlab electrospray group under Dr. Elaine Petro, where he was first introduced to the fascinating world of plasma and propulsion. During his undergraduate studies, Mo also conducted and published his computational research in Density-functional Theory (DFT) for the development of multivalent ion batteries. In his free time, Mo likes to play guitar, snowboard, and enjoy the outdoors. LinkedIn, GitHub

Graduate Student, OSU Team

Katherine is an Accelerated Masters Program student in Mechanical Engineering at OSU. She pursued a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University. She is a part of the Hall Thruster experimental team, focusing on magnetism and measuring magnetic fields. She has previously worked at Oregon Tool and Tektronix as a mechanical engineer. LinkedIn, Email

Ph.D. 2023

Angelica was a graduate student focusing on plasma-material interactions of structured surfaces. Processes of interest include erosion and secondary electron emission, and experiments are carried out in the dedicated Pi facility at the Plasma and Space Propulsion Laboratory. Previously, Angelica was employed at a private nuclear fusion company, TAE Technologies (formerly Tri Alpha Energy) as a plasma diagnostic specialist where she was part of the development, commissioning and operation of the Thomson Scattering system and magnetic diagnostics for the advanced beam-driven fusion reactor, C-2W. Before that, Angelica was an undergraduate Department of Energy Fellow at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory where she worked on carbon velvet surface for Hall-thrusters as well as an intern at the Swiss Plasma Center in Lausanne, Switzerland working on high-power gyrotron development for ITER and TCV tokamaks.

Ph.D. 2023

Henry was graduate student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. He received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sogang University in 2015. His current research effort is focused on computational modeling of electrospray propulsion and was awarded NASA Space Grant Fellowship in 2018. He is currently in the DOD HPC Internship Program (HIP) at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Edwards AFB. Henry enjoys playing soccer and foosball.

Ph.D. 2022

Shehan Parmar is a second year graduate student at UCLA. He received his B.S. in Astronautical Engineering and minor in Physics from the University of Southern California in 2019. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the USC Collaborative High Altitude Flow Facility (CHAFF), where he investigated thermal and catalytic decomposition mechanisms of ionic liquids using molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. After graduation, he began working for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) as a spacecraft propulsion consultant to develop a reduced-order model for green monopropellant thruster technologies. Shehan joined the Plasma and Space Propulsion Lab in 2020, where his research focuses on computational modeling of electrospray propulsion. Shehan is also a member of the UCLA First-Generation Graduate Student Council (FGGSC).

Ph.D. 2022, Electric Propulsion Engineer, Maxar Technologies

Thesis: Porous Electrospray Fluid Mechanics

Peter received his B.S. from Boston University in 2013, with a major in Mechanical Engineering and a concentration in Aerospace Engineering. He was part of the Boston University satellite development team, BUSAT. After graduating, he went on to research electrospray propulsion at Busek before coming to the Plasma and Space Propulsion Lab in 2017. For his doctoral research, he studied porous electrospray thrusters by combining established electrospray relations with the fundamentals of porous flow and developing electrospray thrusters for near-field plume characterization.

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Ph.D. 2022, Aerospace Engineer, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Thesis: Secondary Species Emission and Behavior for Electrospray Thrusters

While at UCLA, Nolan’s research interests included plasma metamaterial composite structures, plasma material interactions, improving electrospray thruster life and performance, electrohydrodynamic instabilities, high-speed electrospray thruster dynamics, and electrospray thruster facility effects. Nolan was a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow.

After receiving his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Nolan spent 5 years working in industry. At Tri Alpha Energy (now called TAE Technologies), Nolan developed pulsed power systems and high-speed diagnostics for the C-2 fusion energy experiment. Nolan went on to work at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), where he spent several years researching Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC) propulsion, Hall Thruster facility interactions, and multiplexed electrospray thrusters.

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Ph.D. 2022, Senior Member Of Technical Staff, The Aerospace Corporation

Thesis: Plasma-Material Interactions for Electric Propulsion and Plasma-Facing Components

Ani graduated from Rutgers University in 2016 with a double major in Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering and Astrophysics. His current research efforts are focused on low-frequency instabilities associated with ExB plasma discharges, plasma-material interactions, and electrospray thruster lifetime. In his free time, Ani enjoys running and other outdoor activities.

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Ph.D. 2021, Senior Member of the Technical Staff, The Aerospace Corporation

Thesis: Miniature Ion Thruster Characterization via Discharge Plasma, Plume, and Mission Analyses

Stephen developed the MiXI thruster under an NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF) to increase the TRL of miniature ion thruster technology. He received his B.S degree in 2014 from Auburn University, and joined the Plasma and Space Propulsion Lab in September 2015.

email, LinkedIn

Ph.D. 2020, Spacecraft Systems Engineer, The Aerospace Corporation

Thesis: Plasma Sputtering Behavior of Structured Materials

Gary is currently working at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA as a spacecraft systems engineer. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a double major in Astrophysics and Physics in 2014 and UCLA with a PhD in Aerospace Engineering in 2020. His research interests include plasma-material interactions and the physics of miniature ring-cusp ion thrusters. He studied the sputtering properties of micro-architectured materials for minimizing erosion of plasma thruster walls. Gary has participated in research projects for liquid metal electrospray thrusters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Summer 2014) and field reversed configuration thrusters at the Air Force Research Lab (Summer 2016). In his free time, Gary enjoys teaching kids about science in Building Engineers and Mentors (BEAM) and Asian American Tutorial Project (AATP).

In-situ Sputtering Yield Measurements of Micro-architectured Materials

Design and Development of a Miniature Ring-Cusp Ion Thruster (Past)

Investigation of Ionic Liquid Electrospray Extraction Mechanisms

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Ph.D. 2019, Research Scientist, Air Force Research Lab

Thesis: Porous Electrospray Fluid Mechanics

Cesar Huerta received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2019, majoring in Aerospace Engineering. He received his M.S. in 2015 and his B.S. in 2012 from UCLA and was awarded the Eugene V. Cota Robles Fellowship in 2012. His research was focused on computationally modeling plasma-mediated material interactions through sputtering, deposition, and erosion. Outside of research, Cesar likes to be involved in the community, to motivate and teach young students, and enjoyed his job as a Teaching Assistant.

Photonic Crystal Array Microdischarge Modeling via DC-Ion (Past)

Ph.D. 2019, Postdoctoral Scholar, UCLA

Thesis: Thermofluidics of Sulfur-based Thermal Energy Storage.

Kaiyuan received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2019. He graduated from Tsinghua University, China, with a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering. He reseearched heat transfer behavior of sulfur in containment and performance of sulfur-based thermal energy storage system. Kaiyuan is a recipient of an Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering departmental fellowship.

Lab-scale demonstration of thermal energy storage concept with sulfur

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