Three graduate students received awards at the 2023 Wu Student Competition held earlier this month at UTSI. The annual competition is an open forum for graduate students to present their research in a competition-based format and provides them an opportunity to hone their oral presentation skills while also learning about numerous fields of research. There were nine graduate students that participated in the competition. Award winners were:

Michael Stokes, First Place; Oriana Palumbo, Second Place; and Kyle Ackerman, Third Place.

Each award included a travel grant.

The competition is named for Susan and Jimmy Wu, both of which were professors at UTSI. After retiring from UTSI, Susan started her own company, ERC, in Huntsville in 1988. The company has grown significantly since then and representatives from ERC attended the competition to show their support.

Bruce Moylan, Robin Ozborne, and Tom Geil served as judges of the competition. Moylan is lead of the Lockheed Martin Aeroshell Working Group and a member of the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics where he supports activities in the corporate steering committee and is actively engaged in supporting multiple Small Business Innovative Research programs as a technology advisor. Ozborne is a mechanical engineer with ERC and has worked at NASA Marshal Space Flight Center for the last 23 years. She is a subject matter expert in the design, test, and evaluation of rocket engine ignition systems. She also serves as the NASA component lead for the augmented spark igniter for the RS-25 engine, which is the core stage engine for the Space Launch System. Geil was a research professor at UTSI and worked with the Wu’s in the Advanced Diagnostics Branch of the Energy Conversion Division at UTSI from 1979 to 1999. Soon after Susan started ERC, he went to work at NASA and then rejoined her at ERC until retiring to part time in 2020.