One of Nigeria’s greatest strength — and
perhaps weakness — is her ability to make global headlines for birthing some of
the most ingenious people to have walked the planet.
Today, on
this episode of Nigeria’s talent export is Wendy Okolo, one of the first black
women to bag a doctorate — not honorary — degree in aerospace engineering,
anywhere on the planet.
Born to a
family of six in southeastern Nigeria, Okolo says her number one heroes are her
sisters — Jennifer and Phyllis — who taught her biology, and other sciences
with their day-to-day realities.
Okolo
received her BSc and PhD degrees in aerospace engineering from the University
of Texas at Arlington in 2010 and 2015 respectively.
During
her undergraduate years, she was in the African Student Society at the
University of Texas at Arlington. She was also the president of the society of
women engineers in the university.
Okolo’s
career has taken flight at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA), the U.S. agency responsible for the civilian space program, as well as
aeronautics and aerospace research.
She was
only 26 years old when she became the first black woman to obtain a PhD in
aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington.
INTERNSHIP AT NASA — AND HER
IMPOSTOR’S SYNDROME
During her undergraduate studies, she interned for two
summers with Lockheed Martin working on NASA’s Orion spacecraft, first in the
requirements management office in systems engineering and then with the Hatch
Mechanisms team in mechanical engineering.
As a
graduate student, she worked as a summer researcher from 2010 to 2012 in the
Control Design & Analysis Branch at the Air Force Research Laboratory
(AFRL), Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
She
worked with the team that flew the world fastest manned aircraft, which flew
from coast to coast in 67 minutes — this normally takes over five hours for some
of the fastest jets around.
Okolo
said she had to battle impostor’s syndrome when she found out she would be
working with such a great team.
“I was
like I am sure these guys are so smart, what am I going to bring in,” she said.
She went on an error in the code in the systems and she fixed that and “that
fixed the impostor syndrome for a while”.
Now,
Okolo is an aerospace research engineer at the Ames Research Center,
a major NASA research centre in California’s Silicon Valley.
NAMED THE MOST PROMISING ENGR. IN
THE US GOVT
In 2019, she won the BEYA Global
Competitiveness Conference award for the most promising engineer in the United States
government.
She
encourages young girls to pursue their dreams in science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM).
Her
previous research has been recognized and funded by the Department of Defense
through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship; Zonta
International, through the Amelia Earhart Fellowship; and the American
Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics through the John Leland Atwood
Graduate Fellowship.
Currently,
Okolo is a special emphasis programs manager in the Intelligent Systems
Division of NASA’s Ames Research Center.
She is
working on the System-Wide Safety (SWS) project, and a Space Technology Mission
Directorate Early Career Initiative (STMD-ECI) project at the Ames Research
Center.
For the
SWS project, she led the task of predicting GPS faults in unmanned aerial
systems commonly known as drones.
Okolo
worked with Langley Research Center in Virginia to investigate flight data and
facilitate data exchange across and within NASA centers.
On the
STMD-ECI project, she leads the controls team to develop unconventional control
techniques for deployable vehicles, to enable precision landing and improve
maneuverability during the entry, descent, and landing phases of spaceflight.
The
STMD-ECI project is a $2.5 million-dollar project that she proposed and won as
part of a six-member early- career scientist team.
– Culled from The Cable
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