2019-06-07: It's Summer, and the Interns are Back!

The Excellent Eight

The summer has officially arrived and B1230 is filled with this season's interns.  We are welcoming a few new faces, while also opening our arms back up to some former friends.

Let's meet everyone!

Payton Heyman

First off, I must reintroduce myself.  My name is Payton Heyman and I'm returning for my third internship under Danette Allen!  I just finished my freshman year at the Savannah College of Art and Design where I am majoring in Social Strategy and Management with a minor in Film Production.  I am more than happy to return to NASA to continue creating video and blog content, as well as running the social media platforms: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Javier Puig-Navarro

Javier Puig-Navarro has been with the Ai since 2014. While working towards his Ph.D at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne, he has been a very important part of our team.  He is continuing to do research in time critical coordination and path planning for multiple unmanned vehicles.

Jeremy Castagno

After spending a few weeks with us last summer, Jeremy Castagno returned to the Ai about three weeks ago to continue his work!  He received his Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University and currently is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Michigan, where he has now completed three years and attained his Master's in Robotics.  He will be continuing his work with emergency landings for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), aiming for autonomous machines to be more humanlike in making decisions, especially when it comes to landing and risk assessments. He is working a lot with multi-modal data fusion with modalities including the depth information and the RGB camera information.

Ben Hargis also made his triumphant return to the Ai in mid May.  He is a Ph.D student at Tennessee Technological University, studying mechanical engineering with a focus in robotics.  This summer he is working on a feasibility study for inertial transport, where they will be creating a multi-agent system that can transport objects successfully in a zero gravity environment.

Chase Noren

Chase Noren returned for another internship back in January, and he is staying through July.  In August, he will be starting his Ph.D program at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute.  During his time here, he is assisting a metrology study for future In Space Assembly missions.  The main goal is to better inform our understanding of how autonomous systems will be utilized in space.

Jamie O'Brien

Jamie O'Brien arrived mid May and is a new face to the Ai.  She is a rising junior at the Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, where she is studying electrical and computer engineering.  This summer she will be working with Chase and Ben on the inertial transport project.  She, along with Ben and Chase, are preparing a demonstration to exhibit some of the results of the study.

Katie Clark

Katie Clark is a rising senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.  She will be spending her first summer at the Ai working with Lisa Le Vie, where she will be studying interactions between humans and robots. Through this study, she will be categorizing people's reactions to the different transparency levels, as well as quantifying minimum trust levels for different tasks.

Sarah Woodham

Sarah Woodham is a rising senior at Virginia Tech, where she is majoring in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science.  This is her first internship with us and will be working very closely with Natalia Alexandrov and Rob Moreland at NASA Headquarters in DC. Throughout her internship, she will be "cleaning and mashing data sets from the NASA Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) and the Safety Culture Survey," which will then "be used by contractors to visualize and analyze the data using Power BI."

All of the interns are excited to take on the summer with new projects and goals in mind! Make sure to stay up to date!