Alumnus Radocaj leads third roundtable session
When Dan Radocaj and his classmates in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics gathered in the student lounge at Grissom Hall in the late 1990s and early 2000s for “Professor Pizza” sessions, he wondered then if he’d ever have the opportunity to lead one someday.
“They were great,” he says now, thinking back.
And the response from current students likely would be the same – especially for Radocaj’s sessions, now that he’s more than fulfilled his college aspirations.
His most recent appearance as speaker at the event that invites alumni to give a presentation and take questions from students was in late August. It was his third roundtable since graduating. Radocaj (BSAAE ’00, MSAAE ’01) also came back to campus in 2009 after graduating from test pilot school, and Trip No. 2 came a couple years later.
For Radocaj, a U.S. Navy Test Pilot, it’s a no-brainer to tie a trip back into campus with visiting family in Indiana. And he didn’t hesitate to spend about 30 minutes after his presentation answering students’ questions in a hallway outside of ARMS 1010.
“It’s special,” Radocaj says. “I’m a huge believer in people. Ultimately, when you look back on your life, you don’t realize the accomplishments you did, you realize all the people you were with when you did things. People is where it’s at. I think we forget that sometimes. Those interactions and affecting different peoples’ lives (matters).
“I just enjoy this kind of thing.”
Radocaj recalls his time at Purdue fondly. Even his first test flight experience as part of AAE’s team of undergraduate students selected by NASA to design, build, and test an experiment in short duration weightlessness on the “vomit-comet” aircraft as part of Prof. Steven Collicott’s class. That zero-g slosh payload was followed by another winning proposal, one on a method to create foamed aluminum in weightlessness.
Radocaj’s master’s degree research on oil sump flows in Rolls-Royce engines began a long-running, multi-professor program in AAE that demonstrated how to improve the AE3007 and other RR engines, as well as aided in design of the lift-fan oil sump for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
He met his wife, Trisha, while at Purdue, too. She received her bachelor’s in chemical engineering before switching to AAE, a transition that had started before she met Radocaj at that “vomit-comet” event in Houston.
“I loved it here,” Radocaj says. “I never set foot on campus before the day I showed up to go to class here. I didn’t come for a visit. I just knew that Purdue Aero was where I wanted to go because of the astronaut (reputation). So I just came here.
“I got lucky that it was so awesome.”
Back home in Patuxent River, Md., Dan and Trisha own an escape room – “probably the most engineering we’ve done since college,” he says, because “we designed everything, and we built everything” -- and the couple are parents to three daughters.
