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May
22, 2004, 16S:
Special Commencement Issue
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Bechtel
Achievement Award: Emery
Sanford, ME
Bechtel
Engineering Scholarship:
Austin Minnich, Eng. Science
Departmental
Citation Winners:
Ryan Doan, BioE
Sarah Gidding, CEE
Kevin Simler, EECS
Olivia Or, Eng. Science
Anthony Paganini, IEOR
Priam Pillai, MSE
Matt Panzer, ME
Ryan Hannink, NE
Other
Departmental Awards
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Photo
by Nick Lammer
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Bechtel Engineering
Scholarhip : Austin Minnich
Few sophomores have as clear
a vision of their future careers as Engineering Science major Austin Minnich.
His dream job happens to also be his career goal. He not only knows where
he wants to work, but what he wants to accomplish during that career.
When Austin talks about his future profession he won’t be able to
evoke the catch phrase, ‘It’s a hard job, but it’s not
rocket science.’
“I want to develop new types of propulsion technologies that will
allow more inexpensive access to space,” he says.
He sees himself working for either NASA or a private space company and
is interested in helping develop a hypersonic airplane.
Austin has wasted no time on the road to achieving his goal. As a freshman
he started doing research for NE/EECS professor John Verboncoeur on simulating
the reentry of the Columbia space shuttle to try to predict the heat load
and period of maximum stress on the aircraft. He is now working on ion
thruster engines for the same research group.
Austin isn’t intimidated to be one of just a few undergrads in his
research group, but rather feels he learns more from the graduate students
in the group than he does in class or from his peers.
His comfort in the lab is largely due to growing up in a high-tech research
environment, the son of two computer engineers at Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico.
While his peers were working in ice cream shops or going to the beach,
Austin spent his last four summers working at Los Alamos National Labs
doing scientific computing. This summer he will return there to do turbulence
research.
Science was always in Austin’s blood, but so was music. He grew up
playing the trombone and the piano and went through a phase in junior
high when he wanted to be a professional musician. That soon changed.
“I love music, but once I started taking physics and math courses,
I knew that I didn’t want to be a professional musician,” he
says.
At Berkeley, Austin plays trombone in the UC Big Band. To him, music is
the best way to relax. He also enjoys hiking and being outdoors.
He chose to come to Berkeley because it was one of the few universities
in the country to have a computational engineering major, now in its third
year. In a couple of years Austin wants to go to graduate school to study
aeronautical engineering.
Austin’s lofty professional goals include the desire to promote the
development of the private space industry and shift the focus from NASA
as the center of space flight to private companies.
“The development of private industry in the space sector would encourage
faster progress in space flight research. Where the money is, things tend
to happen.”.
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