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Nathan Crane, MS AE '20 |
Nathan Crane, MS AE '20, has been selected to receive the 2020 Abe Zarem Graduate Student Award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
The award is bestowed annually to recognize graduate students in aeronautics and astronautics who have demonstrated outstanding scholarship in their field. Crane was specifically recognized for his paper, "Preliminary Active Subspace Investigation of a Commercial Supersonic Design Space," which he'll be invited to present at the 2021 Congress of the International Council of Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS).
“We at the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory are all proud of Nathan for his work,” said Regents Professor, Dimitri Mavris who mentored Crane. “The Zarem award is recognition of his excellence and contributions, and it is well deserved.”
Crane successfully defended his master's thesis, "A Methodology to Reduce Dimensionality of a Commercial Supersonic Transport Design Space Using Active Subspaces" before leaving Tech to take a position as an aerospace technologist at the NASA Langley Research Center.
"My graduate research and the whole experience within ASDL really prepared me for this position by teaching me to look at problems from a systems perspective," said Crane. " At NASA, I am actively working on commercial supersonic design and trade studies within the Aeronautics Systems Analysis Branch."
"At Tech, my research focused on investigating dimensionality reduction of a commercial supersonic transport design space using a novel technique called Active Subspaces. This technique intelligently combines physical design variables into active subspace variables, and the dimensionality active subspace variables can be reduced, decreasing computational time. The main benefit of this technique is that due to all active subspace variables being combinations of the physical variables, less information is lost when reducing dimensionality compared to removing the physical variables."
"We are really proud of his achievements," said William R. T. Oakes School Chair and Professor Mark Costello. "His initiative is what we strive to develop in all of our students."
In 2019, Daniel Guggenheim School doctoral student Johnie Sublett was one of two graduate students recognized with a Zarem Award.