• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2018

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aerospace Engineering, MS ‘21

• The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Mechanical Engineering, BE ‘19

• Host Institution: Avascent

• Mentor: Kristin White

Skylar Eiskowitz is currently a graduate student and NSF Fellow at MIT in the AeroAstro Department. She is working under Dr. Edward Crawley in the Systems Architecture Group and with Dr. Kalyan Veeramachaneni in the Data-to-AI group where her research is in applying machine learning to satellite communication networks.

Skylar received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan. She graduated summa cum laude and humbly received the highest award bestowed to an engineering student, the Harold S. Goldberg Prize. While at The Cooper Union, she was the head teaching assistant of the physics department, mentored in a STEM outreach program, started a SEDS chapter and was captain of Cooper Union’s Women’s Basketball and Volleyball teams.

Skylar’s love for physics and mathematics along with her desire to make meaningful contributions to the world led her to study engineering. She participated in a physics REU at the University of Maryland where she won best overall project for her research on Saturn’s rings. Here she learned that she could merge her academic interests with her curiosities about nature into a career in aerospace engineering. As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Skylar interned at Avascent, gaining a new appreciation for the intersection of technology, policy, and business. Recently, Skylar interned at The Aerospace Corporation in the Modeling and Simulations Department.

Just as Skylar gets very easily inspired, she hopes to inspire others; she is a strong believer in Feynman’s words, “if you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.” In her spare time, Skylar loves playing basketball, volleyball, surfing, painting, and reading nonfiction.