• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2019

• Kent State University, B.S. Aerospace Engineering, '20

• Host Institution: Kitty Hawk

• Mentor: George Nield

Sydney Bihn grew up in Sylvania, Ohio and graduated with her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Kent State University in 2020 as the first woman engineering graduate in Kent State’s history.

Originally pursuing a degree in Middle Childhood Education with a concentration in mathematics and science at Kent State, Sydney’s passion for learning about women’s contributions in STEM, enticed her to become one of the women making contributions in STEM. The aerospace industry, with its vast career opportunities, and engineering, combining her love of math with applications to real-world problems, proved the perfect combination. She changed her major to aerospace engineering, hit the ground running, and hasn’t looked back.

In her first semester as an engineering major, Sydney found and secured an engineering internship at Prince and Izant Companies in Parma, Ohio. She also worked with another Brooke Owens Fellow, Kayla Watson, to establish the requirements for an Unmanned Aircraft Safety City for the state. She briefed the project to the Ohio Aerospace and Aviation Council in April 2018 and at Ohio Aerospace Day in December 2018. That same year she was also selected to attend the Farnborough International Air Show in the United Kingdom as a student ambassador to Kent State. She was also one of 200 students nationwide selected to attend the “ThinkChicago: Chicago Ideas Week” in October 2018.

As an engineering student, Sydney was a member of the university’s high-power rocket design team, which placed first in the launch phase of the 2018 Midwest High-Power Rocket Competition and fourth overall out of 18 teams. Sydney also proved to be a capable researcher, spending two semesters on an undergraduate research project conducting wind tunnel testing on various airfoils for renewable energy wind turbine applications. During the Spring 2019 semester, Sydney worked on an unmanned aircraft systems design project to enhance her understanding of UAS platforms before her Kitty Hawk internship as a Brooke Owens Fellow in the summer of 2019. At Kitty Hawk, Sydney worked with the Manufacturing Engineering Team on developing new tooling and processes for assembling the lift-fan motors. During her senior year, Sydney was elected to be Project Manager of the Kent State AIAA Design/Build/Fly Capstone Design Team and lead the team in constructing a composite remote aircraft.

Sydney started her professional career working at Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Arizona as a Manufacturing Engineer for their Multi-Layer Insulation Blanket Lab. Since then, she has been promoted to Operations Manager of the Harness Work Center. In her free time she enjoys exploring all the new places, reading, home improvement projects, spending time with family and friends and look for ways she can give back to her community, specifically young women in STEM.