• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2024

• California Institute of Technology, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and Business, Economics, and Management, ‘25

• Host Institution: Space Capital

• Mentor: Carissa Christensen

• Brookie Mentor: Jen Berry

Nicole is a junior at Caltech pursuing a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Business, Economics, and Management with a minor in Aerospace Engineering.

From a young age, Nicole’s love for mathematics and science has driven her to solve problems in her community, using her altruistic motives to fuel her engineering passion. Motivated by a fervor for sustainable technology in low-resource communities, Nicole considers frontier technologies in aerospace as her means to effect positive change.

At Caltech, Nicole works at the Fluid Mechanics and Thermosciences group at the graduate aerospace laboratories (GALCIT), publishing fluid mechanics work on physics-informed machine learning to experimental and computational aerodynamics, acquired by Boeing to advance airwing computation. Her past projects share the common origin of problem solving worldly causes. Notably hired by environmentalist groups and major gas companies, Nicole has built a reservoir compaction poroelastic model to develop a carbon capture and sequestration site in Canada.

Last summer, Nicole worked at The Aerospace Corporation as a propulsion intern. Her work developing tools in solid motor propellant grain regression and calculating and compiling ballistic analysis from static fire tests significantly contributed to the Space Systems Command, resulting in enhanced launch performance assessments.

Nicole is currently conducting new research with GALCIT for a project modeling fluid dynamics in a fluid-filled elastic tube. Beyond academia, she has been dancing and choreographing since she was young and leads the dance team at Caltech. Nicole finds joy in performing, serving as a social director at Caltech, cooking, painting, and sewing clothes.

Eager to explore the transformative potential of frontier technology, she is set to intern at Space Capital in New York this summer, further solidifying her commitment to shaping a brighter future through innovation.