PhD Graduation

I am happy to share that I have successfully defended my PhD thesis in Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. I am immensely grateful to my advisor, Prof. Elaine Petro, my committee members, Prof. Dmitry Savransky and Prof. Anil Damle, and to all ASTRA Lab members and the Cornell community for being part of this amazing journey. My thesis covered three independent topics, all united under the umbrella of space propulsion:

1. Space missions are terminated once the onboard fuel is depleted. My research develops an analytical framework to model and optimize on-orbit refueling.
2. A type of electric thrusters, called “electrospray thrusters”, are used for the propulsion of small satellites and they utilize ionic liquids as propellant. My research builds a supervised machine learning classifier to identify whether an ionic liquid is a “suitable” or “unsuitable” propellant.
3. During the operation of electrospray thrusters, molecule-molecule and molecule-wall collisions occur and lead to system degradation. My research uses Molecular Dynamics simulations to model these collisions and predict their outcomes.
   Excited for the next chapter!