Katelyn Lancaster is a Senior pursuing a Bachelor’s of Science in Aerospace Engineering and a Mathematics minor. She has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2020 working in flight test operations, system identification, and the Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) project. Katelyn will be continuing her system identification work with a fall project integrating SIDPAC analysis for our current vehicles. Katelyn has interned the previous 3 summers at Lockheed Martin working in Configuration Management and Flight Test Engineering.
Evelyn Madewell
Evelyn Madewell earned her B.S. in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering with a minor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington in May 2024. As an undergraduate researcher in the Autonomous Flight Systems Lab, she worked on wilderness search and rescue, hazard-aware landing optimization, and beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations, presenting this work at the 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum. She also completed industry internships as a flight test engineer at Freefly Systems and with Hood Technology, focusing on UAV flight testing and GPS-denied visual navigation.
Evelyn joined the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory (VSCL) at Texas A&M University in Fall 2024, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering focused on Dynamics and Controls. At Texas A&M, she has contributed to the Real-time System Identification of UAS project and has participated extensively in flight test activities. In Summer 2025, she interned with Stratolaunch, working on guidance, navigation, and control for the Talon A vehicle. She is a recipient of the Aerospace Graduate Excellence Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Her research interests include flight test engineering, system identification, and guidance, navigation, and control for autonomous systems.
Cassie-Kay McQuinn
Cassie-Kay McQuinn graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering with Engineering Honors, and a M.S. in Aerospace Engineering both from Texas A&M University. In addition to completing Engineering Honors, she is a Presidential Endowed Scholar and has earned a certificate of Holistic Leadership in Engineering through completion of the Zachry Leadership Program. Her Masters thesis, titled “Online Near-Real Time Open-Loop System Identification from Closed-Loop Flight Test Data“, investigated identifying linear dynamic models onboard a vehicle in near-real time with and without an active controller. This work was performed for a small Unmanned Air System (UAS) utilizing low cost, commercial-off-the-shelf components. She is currently pursing a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering.
Cassie-Kay joind VSCL in Fall of 2021 and is currently the Flight Testing Operations Lead for the team. She is a reciepiant of the Stanger Endowed Fellowship and the Doctoral Research Excellence Assisstantship. Additionally, she is a member of the AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee. While in graduate school, she has interned with Sandia National Labs and the Air Force Research Lab Autonomous Capabilities Team (ACT3). Most recently, while working with ACT3, she was hosted by the Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS) to support space test research and collaborations to enhance TPS’ Space Test Course (STC). Cassie-Kay’s current work investigates applying run time assurance algorithms for safety critical system. Her interests are in the implementation of trusted autonomy, flight testing, and aircraft dynamics.
Carla Zaramella
Carla Zaramella, a member of VSCL since January 2022, is a second year M.E. in Aerospace Engineering student. She graduated in December 2024 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and minor in Mathematics. As an undergraduate, she contributed towards the System Identification Project and aided with Flight Testing. As a graduate student, she is a Teaching Assistant for a junior-level flight dynamics course and contributed towards MARBLES and the 6-DOF Linear Flight Simulator.
Carla has interned with Raytheon Technologies for two summers, working on land/air radar defense systems. She also interned at Bristol Myers Squibb in their supply chain department, where her primary focus was optimizing and streamlining existing supply chain processes through data analytics and integration of decision intelligence.