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KAREN RUCKER

  • Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2017

  • Texas Tech University, Electrical Engineering, ‘19

  • Host Institution: HawkEye 360

  • Mentor: Erika Wagner

Karen Rucker is a Spacecraft Radio Frequency (RF) Engineer at Ball Aerospace in Colorado, after graduating magna cum laude from Texas Tech University with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2019. Once a college dropout, she was a non-traditional student who returned to school after finding herself unchallenged in her job as a secretary at the age of 26.

From 2014 to 2016, Karen worked full-time answering 911 as a police dispatcher at night while going to school full-time during the day. After being the first woman to graduate with an Associate’s degree in Electrical Engineering from McLennan Community College, she transferred to Texas Tech University (TTU). There, she was a leader with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), involved with Women in Engineering and the Society of Women Engineers, and worked as a student researcher in the TTU Microwave Laboratory. She completed internships at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.

As a 2017 Brooke Owens Fellow, Karen worked at HawkEye 360. She assisted in software-defined radio (SDR) payload test and integration, supported processing and generation of RF data within GNU Radio, and developed Python scripts for digital signal processing (DSP), most notably a cell-averaging Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm for radar. 

Karen is also a part-time Aerospace Engineering master’s student at the University of Colorado Boulder, studying remote sensing and RF engineering for aerospace. In her free time, she enjoys running, hiking, and outreach for STEM and LGBTQ+ inclusion.