We are thrilled to announce that Jackson Kennedy has joined our lab as a PhD student. Jackson comes to us after completing his MS in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at Stanford and his BSE in Mechanical Engineering at Duke University. Jackson is an avid space enthusiast who has previously worked as an Associate Responsible Engineer and Associate Build Engineer for the Starship Propulsion Components team at SpaceX. At Stanford, he was a co-lead for the Stanford Student Space Initiative (SSI) Project Olympus liquid bi-propellant rocket, serving as responsible engineer for a test launch at Friends of Amateur Rocketry in the Mojave. At Duke, he was technical lead and VP for the two-stage test vehicle and single-stage IREC rocket launched at the Spaceport America Cup. He also founded and taught a class, Engineering Basics for Trinity, designed specifically to lower the barriers to entry for engineering and creative a supportive and creative classroom environment. He is excited to work on detonation, shock-droplet interactions, and the interplay between kinetics and thermodynamics in high-speed combustion. A wide variety of tools will be needed to advance the frontier in those areas, so he will combined experiment, simulation, and develop new theory. Connect with Jackson on LinkedIn or check out his website here.
