People

Faculty

Brandon Jones

Dr. Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics that specializes in data fusion and uncertainty quantification for astronautics. He is affiliated with both the Center for Space Research and the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. He is also the Director of the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory.

Current Graduate Students

Anand Agrawal

Graduate Research Assistant

Anand is a Ph.D. student who graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013 and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Emory University in 2011. He started at UT Austin in the Fall of 2021 after previously working as a civilian engineer with the Department of the Navy focusing on reliability engineering and machine learning. His research interests center on machine learning based pose estimation, deep space navigation, and general GN&C applications.

Sofia Catalan

Graduate Research Assistant

Sofia is a Ph.D. student who started in Fall 2020. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from UT Austin in 2019. Sofia is a Graduate Pathways Intern at the NASA Johnson Space Center and has worked in flight dynamics operations, trajectory design, and autonomous GN&C projects. Her research interests focus on surface feature detection and image processing for ground-based space object tracking and on-board navigation applications.

Alex Chiu

Graduate Research Assistant

Alex is a M.S. student that started working with the group in Fall 2022. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Alex's current research interests are in multi-fidelity methods, rapid orbit propagation, and initial orbit determination.

Rachael Gold

Graduate Research Assistant

Rachael is a Ph.D student who joined the lab in Fall 2020. She graduated from the University at Buffalo in May 2020 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and a B.A. in Mathematics. She has previously held internships at Moog Inc. and the Air Force Research Lab. She also completed a research internship at the University of Florida where she developed and tested control algorithms for formation flying small satellites. Her research interests focus on autonomous orbit determination for application on asteroids and the Moon.

Erika Hill

Graduate Research Assistant

Erika is a Ph.D. student who joined the group in Fall 2017. She graduated in 2017 with a Bachelor of Science from MIT and in 2019 with a Master of Science from UT Austin. Erika has held two internships at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one at the Air Force Research Laboratory. Her research focuses on uncertainty quantification and robust mission design. More specifically, she focuses on using polynomial chaos to optimize spacecraft maneuvers to avoid orbital debris.

Zee McLaughlin

Graduate Research Assistant

Zee joined the Ph.D. program in Spring 2020. They graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering at UT Austin in Fall 2019. Z has held internships at NASA JPL and at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and has worked at UT Austin’s Texas Spacecraft Laboratory as the chief engineer for the ARMADILLO mission. Their research interests lie in satellite geodesy and space debris tracking and mitigation. Their current research focuses on how to utilize small satellites to improve estimates of the atmospheric neutral density.

Benjamin Reifler

Graduate Research Assistant

Ben is a PhD student who joined the group in 2018. His research interests include space situational awareness, multi-target tracking, and autonomous navigation. His recent work focuses on efficient tracking of large populations of space objects, including large satellite constellations and fragmentation events, using labeled random finite sets. Before coming to UT-Austin, Ben earned his BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University at Buffalo, where he led the UB Nanosatellite Laboratory’s Attitude Determination and Control group, and interned at the Air Force Research Laboratory. In his free time, Ben makes music and continues to develop the PAZ Engine, a family of cross-platform libraries for games and simulations.

Trevor Wolf

Graduate Research Assistant

Trevor is a Ph.D. student who joined the group in the Fall of 2019 after graduating from Virginia Tech with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. While an undergrad, Trevor held internships at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Air force Research Laboratory, and Draper Laboratory. Currently, his research interests include high contrast image post-processing for direct exoplanet detection and optimal sensor tasking for space domain awareness. In his free time, Trevor enjoys mountain biking, playing guitar, and exploring Austin.

Enrico Zucchelli

Graduate Research Assistant

Enrico joined the UT Austin ASE/EM Department and the CAELUS Lab as a PhD student in Fall 2018. He is also affiliated to the Robotics Portfolio. Prior to that, he earned his BSc and MSc in Aerospace Engineering from Politecnico Di Milano (Italy, 2013) and TU Delft (The Netherlands, 2016) respectively. He has internship experience at NASA Langley Research Center and work experience at Leaf Space, a startup in Lomazzo, Italy. His research intererests encompass maneuvering space object tracking, multiple target tracking, asteroid navigation and shape reconstruction, nonlinear estimation, GNC, and robotics.

Former Graduate Students

Nicholas Ravago

Ph.D.

Defended July 2022, The University of Texas at Austin, "Applications of Random Finite Set-based Multi-Target Trackers in Space Situational Awareness"

Aaron Brown

Ph.D.

Defended April 2022, The University of Texas at Austin, "Low-Earth Orbit Trajectory Optimization in the Presence of Atmospheric Uncertainty"

Marc Balducci

Ph.D.

Defended September 2018, University of Colorado Boulder, “Orbit Uncertainty Propagation with Separated Representations”.

Click the link to read his thesis.

Akhil Shah

M.S.

Graduated August 2018, The University of Texas at Austin, “Sensor Tasking Utilizing Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Random Finite Set Framework”

Click the link to read his thesis.

Daniel Bryant

Ph.D.

Defended November 2017, University of Colorado Boulder, “Spawn Model Derivations for Multi-Object Orbit Determination within a Random Finite Set Framework”

Click the link to read his thesis.

Julianna Feldhacker

Ph.D.

Defended April 2016, University of Colorado Boulder, “Incorporating Uncertainty into Spacecraft Mission and Trajectory Design”

Click the link to read her thesis.