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Undergrad Awarded AIAA’s Dr. James Rankin Digital Avionics Scholarship

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Department of Aerospace Engineering senior Jeremy Kuznetsov received a 2024 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Dr. James Rankin Digital Avionics Scholarship. AIAA’s Digital Avionics Technical Committee presents the $3,000 scholarship to an outstanding student doing research in the digital avionics discipline.

Kuznetsov is a dual-degree student from Rockville, Md. pursuing both Aerospace Engineering and Mathematics.

He currently conducts research as part of the DARPA Triage Challenge in Professor Derek Paley's Collective Dynamics & Control Lab, where they are developing ground-robots and drones to conduct automated, coordinated disaster-scenario triage. This includes developing methods for collecting biometric data from victims while traversing rough terrain autonomously.

For his honors research, he is designing a kilometer-scale tether-deployment and towed-body system for flight on a near-space balloon within Professor Mary Bowden's Balloon Payload Program (BPP). As a member of the BPP, he’s led several technical projects, published, and presented research at the Academic High-Altitude Conference and AIAA's SciTech conference, and had his latex balloon ascent-control and flight termination system design flown by several universities as part of NASA's Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project.

I want to work towards a future where autonomous systems explore the universe, uncover secrets, and collect resources for humanity, as well as serve us here on Earth. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Rankin and to the AIAA for their support, and will work to make great progress inspired by their leadership and dedication.

Kuznetsov’s honors project comes after a summer internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he prototyped Venus Aerobot deployment during entry into the Venusian atmosphere, and helped to raise the technology readiness level of Aerobot deployment from three to four. He also spent an internship at JPL working on flight operations for the NISAR satellite, scheduled to launch within the next year. He produced simulated data to validate downlinked-data processors, and implemented a mission parameter-state management strategy to track the status of NISAR during its critical deployment phase and into nominal operations.

Outside of his research, Kuznetsov serves both as the executive board secretary for the University of Maryland’s (UMD) AIAA chapter and as a senior member of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Science Dean's Student Advisory Committee.

Post graduation, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering or applied mathematics, and conduct both applied and theoretical research on autonomous systems for space exploration and resource exploitation.

“I want to work towards a future where autonomous systems explore the universe, uncover secrets, and collect resources for humanity, as well as serve us here on Earth,” said Kuznetsov. “I am extremely grateful to Dr. Rankin and to the AIAA for their support, and will work to make great progress inspired by their leadership and dedication.”

Published October 5, 2024