Dr Wendy A. Okolo is an aerospace engineering researcher in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Centre and is celebrated for receiving the “Black Engineer’s Most Promising Engineer in Government Award” at the BEYA STEM Conference in Washington D. C.
Her focus is in the area of systems health monitoring and control systems design with applications to air and space components, vehicles, and systems. To that effect, she is a Sub-Project Manager for the System Wide Safety Project, leading a team to develop the technologies that will enable the safe and seamless integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the U.S. national airspace. She also leads a controls team on a Space Technology project, Pterodactyl, to advance the guidance, navigation, and control capabilities that will make precision landing for deployable entry vehicles a reality for planetary exploration.
Okolo obtained her secondary education at Queen’s College, an all-girls school in Lagos, Nigeria. At only 26 years old, she became the first black woman to obtain a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she earned both her undergraduate and doctoral degrees.
In her undergraduate, she was president of the society of women engineers in the university and as she pursued her graduate degree, she worked as a summer researcher from 2010 to 2012 in the Control Design & Analysis Branch at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where she worked with the team that flew the world fastest manned aircraft which flew from coast to coast in a jaw-dropping 67 minutes, for a trip that could take some of the world’s fastest aircraft over five hours.
She received her B.Sc. and PhD degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2010 and 2015 respectively. During her undergraduate studies, she interned for two summers with Lockheed Martin working on NASA’s Orion spacecraft, first in the Requirements Management Office in Systems Engineering and then with the Hatch Mechanisms team in Mechanical Engineering.
Her dissertation research was in the area of aircraft formation flight as a fuel-saving method of flight, working in the Computer-Aided Control Systems Design Laboratory. Specifically, she employed alternative trimming mechanisms such as internal fuel transfer and differential thrusting to trim induced aerodynamic moments on the trail aircraft, reduce the need for the drag-inducing control effector deflections, and increase the benefits of flying in formation. This research was funded by the AFRL, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), American Institute for Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA), Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC), Zonta International, and the University of Texas at Arlington.
Okolo is working on the System-Wide Safety (SWS) project and a Space Technology Mission Directorate Early Career Initiative (STMD-ECI) project at Ames. For the SWS project, she led the task of predicting GPS faults in unmanned aerial systems commonly known as drones.
On the STMD-ECI project, she leads the controls team to develop unconventional control techniques for deployable vehicles, to enable precision landing and improve maneuverability during the entry, descent, and landing phases of spaceflight. The STMD-ECI project is a $2.5 million-dollar project that she proposed and won as part of a six-member early- career scientist team.
Her previous research has been recognized and funded by the Department of Defense through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship; Zonta International, through the Amelia Earhart Fellowship; and the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics through the John Leland Atwood Graduate Fellowship.
Okolo worked with Langley Research Centre in Virginia to investigate flight data and facilitate data exchange across and within NASA centres.
She says her sisters taught her the sciences with their day-to-day realities. She describes them as her heroes.
Talk about a young and dynamic Nigerian during Nigeria proud internationally and she naturally comes to mind. Indeed with youths like her, the future is bright.
