Personal Projects

Below you will find a brief summary of some of the projects and teams I have been part of. Many of these include the work of others, and most are extensive enought that they could fill their own pages. With this in mind, this page in intended to highlight some of my contributions and give a taste on my interests.

Pilot's License

Over 100 hours logged in several different aircraft including tail wheel and high performance aircraft. This project has been a labor of love, taking place over many years with different flight schools. I was helped enormously by the AOPA and their generous flight training scholarship.

I have recently begun the process of transitioning into soaring as a student member of the Illini Glider Club.

School Bus Conversion

In December 2020 I purchased a used School Bus to convert into my home. I have lived in the bus ever since. It has an off-grid solar system, a wood stove, composting toiled, hot water, kitchen, shower, office, and bedroom.

Shipping Container Conversion

Over the span of 7 weeks, two of my best friends and I converted a shipping container into a tiny home for an airbnb host, and prepared a second container for a custom interior in the future.

Before

After

More Build Photos

Reno Air Races

Race 52: Crew chief JT offered me my first opportunity to attend the Reno Air Races as a crew member for the sport plane flown by Colleen Keller. I was part of this crew for several years. My most notable role was as an engine performance analyst, going through data after each race to determine where more performance could be gained.

The team achieved several notable successes, breaking the 300 mph marker with a normally aspirated engine, being the first female pilot in the sport class to break 300 mph, as well as winning several races in our class.

Race 72: I was also able to act as a crew member for Abe Gaskins and his lancair legacy

Security: when not working as part of a crew I have instead spent my time as a volunteer ramp security guard, helping to check planes and crews onto the active ramp.

Drones: I took first in one heat of the inaugural drone races, helping to introduce the sport of drone racing to the pylon racing fans.

Model Aviation

I started building model aircraft at a young age and soon got bored building other people's designs and switched to designing my own planes. Over the years I have built hundreds of planes.

I was selected to fly for a demonstration at a local airshow
One of my builds was featured by a major youtube show

This hobby has allowed me to push the boundaries of aircraft design even before I knew why these limits existed, giving me an intuitive understanding of what flies and what doesn't.

My local flying group nominated and certified me as an instructor. In this role I was able to teach many new RC pilots the basics as well as representing my local Academy of Model Aeronautics chapter at events.

Low level development

During my undergraduate career I have been fortunate to learn a great deal from Professor Dabdub. After completing a freshman engineering class under him I was invited to join a small group of students to take a series of more intensive classes focusing of the use of programming in engineering. Under Professor Dabdub I learned to write clean, efficient, and fast code using FORTRAN as the learning ground. Through projects such as visualizing the mandelbrot set, I gained enormous insight into methods for writing computationally intensive simulations and models.

Robotics

Defining experiences: Team captain of a highly successful small town team. With a budget that was just a fraction of many of our competitors we were able to successfully compete at the national level multiple times.

During my time in the team I worked as the lead programmer, writing code to allow the robot to autonomously navigate various challenges as well as be controlled remotely by human operators.

I also worked as a team lead for the hardware side of the project, where our limited resources incentivised creative problem solving including fabrication of a metal foundry in order to create aluminum parts, extensive use of simple tools, and modular design goals focusing on robust robotic arms and other manipulators.

In my final two years I took an active role in management as a co-captain and finally captain of the team. During this time I successfully delegated tasks, wrote and taught an introductory programming course for the high-school, collaborated with a small team to raise over $20,000 in local funding from individuals and businesses, and spoke at numerous events and meetings including multiple Rotary Club chapters and the opening of a makerspace.