Two University of Colorado Boulder mechanical engineering PhD students have earned prestigious 2024 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowships.
Alexander Hedrick and Carly Rowe have each been awarded the Department of Defense honor, which provides three year fellowships to promising young scientists and engineers.
The program, established by Congress in 1989, provides fellowships to up to 500 people across the United States annually and is designed to promote education in science and engineering disciplines relevant to the Department of Defense.
Find out more about our honorees and their research below.
Alexander Hedrick
3rd Year PhD Student
Advisor: Kaushik Jayaram
Lab: Animal Inspired Movement and Robotics Laboratory (AIM-RL)
The goal of my research is to advance the capabilities of insect-scale robots. Insects, like many larger animals, are capable of a wide range of abilities like running, walking, jumping, flying, grasping, fitting through tight gaps, and locomoting across different types of surfaces. Inspired by these, many larger scale robots are beginning to execute a number of different actions. However, unlike insects, robots at this scale are typically designed to perform one behavior and fail to accomplish even a close variation of the intended task. Since insect-scale robots are limited by size, weight, and power restrictions, many designs and solutions that work on larger robots cannot be scaled down to insect size. By leveraging shape-morphing and tuned body compliance, I hope to increase the capabilities of these miniature robots in dynamic, unstructured environments without significantly trading-off for size, weight, or power.
Carly Rowe
2nd Year PhD Student
Advisor: Greg Rieker
Lab: Precision Laser Diagnostics Laboratory
My research focuses on laser absorption spectroscopy using mode-locked mid-infrared frequency combs to simultaneously measure velocity, temperature, pressure, species mole fraction, and mass flux with low uncertainty and high resolution in a scramjet combustor. There are currently no diagnostic tools that can simultaneously measure all of the relevant chemical species that are interacting in the combustor of a hypersonic combustion engine, including water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and hydroxide. The fluxes of these chemical species are not well known which inhibits computational fluid dynamics (CFD) developers from improving the physics in their models and propulsion engineers from understanding combustion performance. The data provided by the DCS on the chemical species fluxes at different locations in the combustor will inform CFD developers and propulsion engineers and enable the design of sustainable hypersonic engines. My research will aid in fundamental combustion understanding of hypersonic systems, support the study of internal transitional and turbulent wall-bounded flow which is an important pre-requisite for generating sustainable hypersonic flight, and fuel the Air Force’s basic research objective of developing novel measurement techniques that enable accurate and rapid data collection of physical and chemical flow parameters in extreme environments such as hypersonic engines.