Keerthana Srinivasan

I've loved space since I was a kid, and that passion has driven my journey in aerospace engineering for about 5 years now, starting from 8th or 9th grade. My first real project was in 7th grade when I tried to design a rocket that could fly as fast as light for a science fair, and that experience really captured me and allowed me to continue this journey. Throughout high school, I worked on numerous personal projects, including developing an electrode that could suspend lunar dust on space textiles for spacesuits, and a separate satellite project. One of my main goals is to make the aerospace industry more accessible to women and people with disabilities, because women's health in aerospace is very understudied - if you do a quick literature review, you'll probably only pull up 10 or 20 papers about it, which is very minimal. I want to allow people like that to go to space, rather than only having extremely physically fit or perfect human beings go all the time. I've had the opportunity to do internship work with MIT on spatial AI and robotic perception on the lunar surface, optimizing algorithms for factor graphing and odometry. I also did apprenticeship work at Creative Destruction Labs, a VC firm, where I was mentored and gave advice from a youth perspective for aerospace startups. I worked with professors at McMaster and York universities in Canada on my spacesuit project to build the electrodes, and at Waterloo to build and launch my satellite. Currently, I'm working on nonlinear differential equations to model the menstrual cycle in space, running my podcast to promote what women are doing in aerospace, and managing my nonprofit to encourage more girls to enter the aerospace industry and STEM in general.