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.
Lily Mikulas
Lily Mikulas is a Senior currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. She is expected to graduate in May of 2026. She became passionate about Dynamics and aviation during her time as an undergraduate student and began attending staff meetings in the Fall of 2024. She then became an active member of VSCL in the Spring of 2025. She is currently working on the System Identification Project. Her primary motivation stems from her genuine enthusiasm for aviation safety.
Luis Munoz
Luis Munoz is a senior pursuing a Bachelor’s of Science in Aerospace Engineering. He has been an active member of VSCL since summer 2023. He has worked on flight testing of the labs primary flight platform in the Texas A&M University Oran W. Nicks Low-Speed Wind Tunnel. He has experience working as a research assistant at University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) aerospace center designing a CubeSat model. His interests are in flight controls and dynamics.
Izzy Peressim
Izzy Peressim is a junior pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering with minors in Mathematics and Computer Science. She has been an active member in VSCL since Fall 2025, where she has worked on the Fixed-Wing Target Following project. Her interests are in aerospace vehicle attitude dynamics and controls.
Ankush Rao
Ankush Rao is a senior Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science student from Austin, TX. Ankush aims to pursue his interests in guidance and navigation technology, along with autonomous controls. After joining VSCL in Spring 2024, he has been working on Enhancing the Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems to Facilitate Human-Agent Teaming. In addition, he is a researcher at the Texas A&M Cybersecurity Center. Ankush is looking forward to gaining valuable skills and insight through the combination of Computer Science and Aviation.
Sarah Rosinbaum
Sarah Rosinbaum is a Senior pursuing a Bachelor’s of Science in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. She has been a member of VSCL since the Fall of 2020, working in documentation revision and inertial testing of vehicles. Sarah has interned at Texas Turbine Conversions inspecting aircraft parts and at Alpine Advanced Materials as an engineering/quality intern.
Raul Santos
Raul Santos graduated from Texas A&M University in Spring 2025 with a Bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering with minors in Computer Science and Mathematics. As an undergraduate, he co-founded the Society of Sonic Flight Engineers and began working with the VSCL as an undergraduate assistant. Raul has interned at Albers Aerospace with their Digital Engineering team as a Systems Engineering Intern, and at the Air Force Research Laboratory as a Safe Autonomy Intern with their Autonomy Capability Team. These experiences have motivated Raul to continue pursuing his interests in flight testing and aerospace autonomy as a graduate assistant researcher at the VSCL, beginning Fall 2025.
MD-Nazmus Sunbeam
MD-Nazmus Sunbeam is a M.S. student in the aerospace engineering department. He graduated in May 2021 from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. degree in aerospace engineering. During his undergraduate studies, Sunbeam worked on making a chess AI by training neural nets through evolutionary algorithms using NEAT. Additionally, he assembled and configured quadcopters, using the drone footage to train object detection neural nets. He has experience implementing convolutional neural nets on different image classification and speech recognition problems. His research interests are AI/ML/robotics. In the fall at VSCL, Sunbeam will research Enhancing the Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems to Facilitate Human-Agent Teaming, which is sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory.
Erin Swansen
Erin has over five years of experience in industry at Boeing as a guidance, navigation, and control engineer in the Advanced Autonomous Systems group. Her work involved guidance and control system development for a variety of aerial platforms including UAVs, high performance aircraft, and guided weapons. During graduate school, she has interned at NASA and Sandia National Laboratories doing flight control research and development. Her professional and research background includes significant work using robust and adaptive control to address challenges in flight, particularly for hypersonic vehicles. She has also conducted research sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories to develop a new methodology to improve performance of machine learning algorithms for sparse data sets. Her current research interests focus on implementable and verifiable algorithms that allow the safe use of machine learning in guidance and control architectures. Erin earned a B.S. in Systems Science and Engineering and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.