Research
I am interested in controls, dynamical systems, fluid dynamics, and (most importantly) in the intersection of these three. Somehow, these three interests converged on two unusual applications: jellyfish propulsion at Caltech, and parachute aerodynamics at JPL.
As an undegraduate, I worked on methods for identifying and tracking hairpin packets in direct numerical simulation (DNS) data of hypersonic turbulent boundary layers, under the direction of Pino Martin at the CRoCCo Lab.
At the Dabiri Lab, I worked on computing the Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) in biological and bio-inspired flows, and on applying methods from dynamical systems to vortex dynamics problems in biological flows.
Below is a list of past projects from my time at Caltech and Princeton, with links to their individual pages.
At JPL, I am a Guidance and Control Engineer in the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) group. I work on simulating trajectories for EDL sequences, and on investigating parachute aerodynamics.
Since joining JPL in 2013, I have been a part of the investigation team for the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerators (LDSD) project, which developed new aerodynamic decelerator technologies for landing payloads on Mars. You can find out more about LDSD on the project's page and in the LDSD NASA Fact Sheet . Below is a video of the project's first supersonic flight test, conducted in June of 2014.
