The Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences is welcoming four new faculty members. Meet the team and see why we're so excited about these talented new hires:
Professor Iain Boyd
Iain D. Boyd is a new Professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and is also National Security Faculty Director of the CU Boulder Research and Innovation Office. Boyd joins CU Boulder following two decades at the University of Michigan, where he most recently served as the James E. Knott Professor of Engineering in their Department of Aerospace Engineering. His research interests include hypersonic aerothermodynamics, electric propulsion, rocket plumes and computation of nonequilibrium gas and plasma dynamics.
Instructor Aaron Johnson
Aaron Johnson is a new instructor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. He comes to CU Boulder from the University of Michigan, where he completed post-doctoral research in the Engineering Education Research Program and served as a lecturer in their Department of Aerospace Engineering. Prior to Michigan, Johnson also completed post-doctoral work at the Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. For the past five years, Johnson’s research has focused on engineering education.
Assistant Professor Robyn Macdonald
Robyn Macdonald is joining Smead Aerospace in January 2021 as a new Assistant Professor. She is currently completing post-doctoral research at the Computational Hypersonics Research Lab at the University of Minnesota studying turbulence in hypersonic flows. She completed both her BS (2013) and PhD (2019) in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Macdonald’s research focuses on the development and application of models for hypersonic flows.
Assistant Professor Zachary Sunberg
Zachary Sunberg is joining Smead Aerospace in January 2020 as a new Assistant Professor. He is currently completing the final few months of a postdoctoral scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley. His passion in engineering is making autonomous vehicles robustly safe and efficient by planning with rich models of uncertainty. Before earning his PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University in 2018, He received his BS and MS degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University, with research focused on helicopter autorotation and orbital object tracking.