SPL - Key Persons
Amelia (Mia) is a NASA NSTGRO fellow and PhD candidate in the Space Propulsion Lab. She is from East Freetown, MA and received her B.S. in mechanical engineering from UMass Amherst in 2019 and joined MIT SPL in Fall 2019. Mia received her S.M. in 2021 from MIT with her thesis "Design of a Bimodal Chemical-Electrospray Propulsion System using Ionic Liquid Monopropellants." Her doctorate research focuses on the use of monopropellants (specifically ASCENT propellant) in electrospray thrusters to enable a bimodal chemical-electrospray propulsion system for small spacecraft.
Catherine (Cat) is a NASA NSTGRO fellow and Masters student in the Space Propulsion Lab. She is from Chatham, NJ and received her B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rutgers University in 2022 and joined SPL in Fall 2022. Her masters, and eventually doctoral, research focuses on the design, fabrication, and testing of a "pixel" electrospray thruster, consisting of a flat-panel capillary based electrospray thruster device with an integrated, fuse-separated extractor grid.
Matt is an NSF fellow and PhD candidate in the Space Propulsion Lab. He is from Westchester, NY and received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2020 before coming to MIT the same fall. Matt received his S.M. in 2022 with a thesis titled "Active Thermal Augmentation and Ultra Dense MEMS-Based Electrospray Thrusters". His research focuses on electrospray thruster performance, particularly methods for and impacts of increasing areal thrust density in electrospray thrusters.