• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2023

• University of Colorado Boulder, Aerospace Engineering - Bioastronautics, ‘24

• University of Colorado Boulder, B.S. Aerospace Engineering, ‘23

• Host Institution: ULA

• Mentor: Vanessa Aponte-Williams

• Brookie Mentor: TBD

Skylar Edwards graduating senior at the University of Colorado Boulder in the class of 2023, majoring in Aerospace Engineering & minoring in Biomedical Engineering. She plans to attend CU Boulder again in the Fall to get her M.S. in Bioastronautics, and hopes to spend her career making space travel safe and accessible for everyone.

Skylar is passionate about making women feel like they have a belonging in the space/aviation industry. She is currently the president of the CU Boulder WoAA (Women of Aeronautics and Astronautics) chapter and the Expansion Chair for the international WoAA chapter. Her goals are to provide opportunities for students to gain skills professionally and technically. Skylar wants to develop a community in WoAA where anyone and everyone is welcome, her goal is to draw attention to the gender dilemma in STEM and make women feel like they have a place they belong in the STEM Industry.

Skylar has worked with Dr. Torin Clark and Dr. David Temple in the Bioastronautics Lab for the past three years. In her first year, she assisted graduate students in exploring effects of galvanic vestibular stimulation by streamlining manual control and functional mobility testing. The following year she proposed a research study to the Undergraduates Research Opportunities Program (UROP) to study the effects of the vestibular system and its response to roll tilt motions in conjunction with galvanic vestibular stimulation and how to quantify these effects for pilots in aviation or spaceflight.

Skylar has had two prior internships at NASA JSC, both of which are closely related to work in human spaceflight. In her first internship she worked with a group called Exploration Medical Capabilities (ExMC) in which she was a Model-Based Systems Engineer. In her second internship, she worked with the Space Medicine Operations Division within a team called the Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health (LSAH) in which she worked on creating a database system that would analyze astronaut health exposures and look for trends in data. In addition she also spent the summer after her freshman years as a technical intern for Northrop Grumman where she worked on active space debris removal solutions.

Outside of her professional pursuits, Skylar loves exploring, flying planes, doing yoga.

As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Skylar will spend Summer 2023 as an Intern at the United Launch Alliance in Denver, CO.