Will Staruk Awarded NASA Scholarship

The NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program has awarded Aerospace Engineering graduate student Will Staruk a 2013 graduate scholarship award. The program only awards five graduate scholarships annually, and Staruk was selected from a pool of one hundred applicants.

The NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program is managed by NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD), and administered by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). ARMD’s mission is to invest in long-term research that applies to NASA’s unique capabilities and foster the next generation of aeronautic scientists and engineers.

The two-year scholarship includes:

A $35,000 annual stipend,

Tuition funds up to $11,000 for education related costs, and

An optional ten-week summer internship at a NASA research center with a $10,000 stipend.

Staruk is a Ph.D. student in the Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center working under the advisement of Dr. Inder Chopra. He received his B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and his M.S. from the University of Maryland in 2012. Since starting at Maryland, Staruk has been a member of the Gamera Human Powered Helicopter Team and has served as its project manager since 2011. His research, which will be supported by the NASA scholarship, focuses on developing advanced, 3-D structural modeling techniques for the analysis of helicopter rotor aeromechanics.

Published July 16, 2013