Dr. Kristin-Yvonne Rozier is the new recipient of the Dennis and Rebecca Muilenburg Professorship in the Department of Aerospace Engineering (AerE). It is endowed by Dennis Muilenburg, past CEO and president of The Boeing Company, and an ISU AerE distinguished alumnus (B.S. ’86); and his wife Rebecca Muilenburg, to advance the mission and vision of the AerE department and to make a continuing impact in the aerospace industry and its future talent.
Rozier has been part of the AerE faculty since 2016 after serving as an assistant professor of aerospace engineering and computer science at the University of Cincinnati. She spent 14 years as a research scientist at NASA, holding civil service positions at NASA Ames Research Center and NASA Langley Research Center. During her tenure at NASA, she contributed research to the Aeroacoustics and Safety-Critical Avionics groups at NASA Langley and to the Robust Software Engineering and Discovery and Systems Health groups in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames.
Rozier directs the Laboratory for Temporal Logic in Aerospace Engineering, where she and student researchers focus on such topics as formal methods for the verification and validation of safety-critical systems; design-time checking of system logic and system requirements; run-time system and safety health management for intelligent, autonomous systems and more. Current projects in the laboratory include developing an international community standard for the formal method of model checking, which Rozier and her team have utilized in major verification efforts of air traffic control systems, for both commercial aircraft and UAS. The lab is also innovating their R2U2 framework, the only open-source, flight-certified runtime verification engine, for use on upcoming space missions, including NASA’s Lunar Gateway. R2U2 has previously verified many aircraft and spacecraft including several satellites from different space agencies, and the humanoid robot on the ISS, Robonaut2.
Her advances in computation for the aerospace domain have earned her many awards including: the NSF CAREER Award; the NASA Early Career Faculty Award; American Helicopter Society’s Howard Hughes Award; Women in Aerospace Inaugural Initiative-Inspiration-Impact Award; two NASA Group Achievement Awards; two NASA Superior Accomplishment Awards; Lockheed Martin Space Operations Lightning Award; AIAA’s Intelligent Systems Distinguished Service Award. She is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, and is a Senior Member of IEEE, ACM, and SWE. Dr. Rozier has served on the NASA Formal Methods Symposium Steering Committee since working to found that conference in 2008.
She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from Rice University and M.S. and B.S. degrees from the College of William and Mary.
Funding from the professorship will help Rozier in her research and teaching efforts at Iowa State, supporting her focus on increasing the effectiveness and accessibility of tools for ensuring the safety and security of critical aerospace systems, and training the next generation of aerospace engineers to utilize these throughout the system lifecycle.