Teaching and research expertise in several important areas will be enhanced in the Iowa State University Department of Aerospace Engineering with the arrival of three new faculty members.
Ossama Abdelkhalik comes to the department as an associate professor from Michigan Technological University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering & Engineering Mechanics. His research specialties include space trajectory design, spacecraft dynamics and control, ocean wave energy conversion and optimization.
Abdelkhalik received a B.S. and M.S. in aerospace engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, (1996 and 2000) and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University in 2005. He served as a postdoctoral research associate at Texas A&M in 2005 and 2006, and became a visiting assistant professor at Emery-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2006 and 2007. He joined Michigan Tech as an assistant professor in 2007 and was promoted to associate professor in 2015.
He will teach AerE 551, orbital mechanics, in the fall semester.
A Ram (Bella) Kim has been a Midwesterner since coming to the University of Kansas as an undergraduate. She received her B.S. there in 2013 and her Ph.D. in 2018, both in aerospace engineering. She comes to Iowa State as an assistant professor.
Her research focuses on guidance, navigation, and control for collaborative multi-agent unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in unstructured environments and flight test engineering. She has extensive flight test experience, has been involved in more than 100 UAS flight tests, and has hands-on experience across a wide range of UAS platforms.
She received the Carlin Graduate Teaching Award for 2017-18 as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas. In 2017 she was awarded a prestigious Amelia Earhart Fellowship, which assists women in the field of aerospace engineering. She is enthusiastic about encouraging female and underrepresented minorities in engineering. “When I was young I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” says Kim, who applied for the Air Force Academy in her native South Korea. “But there was a huge gender gap, and very few women got in. So then I focused on going to college to study aerospace engineering. I love how aircraft maneuver, and then along the way I also fell in love with flight dynamics.”
Kim will teach AerE 355, Flight Dynamics & Control, in the fall semester.
Dae Young Lee most recently worked at the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas-Austin where he was a postdoctoral research fellow. He was involved in the development of the attitude determination technology for ICESat-2 and GRACE missions. With a keen interest in space and satellite-related topics, Lee’s research centers on space system design and operation, model predictive control methods and investigating a multidisciplinary approach to enabling future space capability with novel CubeSat missions.
He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Pusan National University, South Korea, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. After nine years of working in industry, he returned to academia and earned an M.S. and Ph.D. (2016) in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. Lee was also a visiting scholar in the Spacecraft Robotics Laboratory at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Dr. Lee will teach AerE 433, Spacecraft Dynamics and Control, in the fall semester.
“We are thrilled to have these three rising professionals join the department, and look forward to their contributions – not only in the education of our students, but in their research abilities in some very important aerospace engineering areas,” said Alric Rothmayer, interim chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering.