April 2, 2012
>
After graduating last year and beginning as a Systems Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, Andrew “Kit” Kennedy (BS ASE ’11) has been accepted to the Fulbright U.S. Scholars Program.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Applicants are chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential.
Kennedy’s fellowship will cover the costs of taking courses and conducting research at the University of Stuttgart in Stuttgart, Germany.
Kennedy’s research will build on the work he did in the Texas Spacecraft Lab (TSL). In Germany, he will be working on the “Flying Laptop” project. True to its name, The “Flying Laptop” is a small satellite composed of a collection of useful electrical and mechanical components that will be tested in space, including a reconfigurable FPGA computer, a novel unfolding mechanism, a GPS experiment and an earth surveillance instrument. Kennedy will be working on a student team to finish programming the satellite’s software and perform qualification tests to prepare the satellite for launch into space.
“The hands on experience and practical application from my work in the Texas Spacecraft Lab have prepared me for what I will be working on in Germany. Classes in orbital mechanics, mechatronics and solids have taught me what a satellite does. My classes have given me the background to understand how it works in a theoretical sense and my hands-on work has prepared me for the application of that knowledge.”
Prior to graduating, Kennedy studied abroad in France. But he believes that this new experience will be unique in that it combines his academic and cultural interests.
“I think it’s going to be a really great experience,” Kennedy said. “I studied abroad in France before this and that was more focused on the language and the idea of living abroad. This is going to be different because I get to unite an engineering experience with the study abroad experience. I get to strengthen ties between my university in Germany as well as my graduate school.”
After his one-year Fulbright Fellowship, Kennedy plans to return to the United States, where he has decided to attend MIT to pursue his PhD.
