Space and aviation fellowships awarded to several Indian-American women

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The Brooke Owens Fellowship which recognizes undergraduate women and other gender minorities with space and aviation internships, senior mentorship, and a lifelong professional network, recently announced its Class of 2021 Brooke Owen Fellows.

Aarti Patel, Jasmin Chadha and Shreyasvi Gowda are the Indian-American undergraduates amongst the 44 fellows. Some 800 applicants from Ivy League universities, major research universities, historically black colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and major international universities, applied for the fellowships according to a press release from the organization.

The selected fellows have demonstrated their desire to pursue a career in aerospace, a record of leadership, a commitment to their communities, and their inexhaustible creativity, Brooke Owens said.

Patel is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) studying Mechanical Engineering. Originally from Yardley, Pennsylvania, she grew up immersed in her Indian heritage and culture. Her interest in space birthed as a child when her father gifted her a telescope.

In addition to her engineering classes, internships in the aerospace industry and undergraduate research, Patel was a co-founding member of Pitt’s Society of Astronautics and Rocketry and now serves as one of the chief engineers of the NASA Student Launch Team at Pitt.

Her most recent research project involved using computer vision to test solar rovers built for an Introduction to Mechanical Design engineering class.

As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Patel will be interning with Airbus U.S. Space & Defense located in Arlington, VA as an Engineering Intern.

Born and raised in Chicago, Chadha is a junior studying Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has dreamt of being an astronaut since she was three years old, and has been captivated by space since then.

At Boulder, Chadha is currently the secretary of the CU Boulder chapter of SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space), the vice chair of the CU Boulder chapter of AIAA (American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics), and an undergraduate research assistant at BioServe Space Technologies.

As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Chadha will join the team at Virgin Orbit.

Gowda is currently studying mechanical engineering at Cornell University. There she is a member of the engineering project team Cornell University Unmanned Air Systems (CUAir) where she collaborates in designing and manufacturing the airframe of the team’s autonomous, fixed-wing, search and rescue aircraft.

In addition to CUAir, Gowda works with Cornell’s Mechanics for Material Design Lab where she received an Engineering Learning Initiatives Undergraduate Research Award for her research conducting finite element simulations of resin infusion.

As a Brooke Owens Fellow, she is looking forward to interning with Joby Aviation in the summer of 2021.

The Brooke Owens Fellows will be matched to an executive-level mentor committed to helping the fellows launch their careers. This summer, the fellows will start their internships and come together virtually for the annual Brooke Owens Summit.