At left, Sonali Sinha Roy gives her award-winning presentation at the SERC Doctoral Student Research Forum. At right, AAE Professor Dan DeLaurentis stands with SERC executive director Dinesh Verma after receiving the SERC Founders Award.

At the 15th annual SERC Research Review, held in November 2023, AAE professor Dan DeLaurentis and PhD student Sonali Sinha Roy received prestigious awards from the Systems Engineering Research Center.

For DeLaurentis, receiving the SERC Founders Award is the culmination of a long career with the network he joined in 2008 — its first year. “I have had the good fortune to propose and be awarded projects of increasing size, primarily in the area of modeling and decisions-support for enterprise-level and systems of systems engineering contexts serving sponsors from a variety of DoD units,” DeLaurentis says.

He assumed the role of chief scientist for SERC in 2018, a role he is concluding in early 2024. He also emcee'd this year's conference.

Dan DeLaurentis, the Bruce Reese Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics

“Receiving the SERC Founders award is a tremendous honor,” he adds, “It’s humbling for sure, given the list of people who have received it. In particular, I think of the first Founders Award recipient, Dr. Art Pyster — now a university leader at George Mason — and last year's recipient Dr. William Rouse, a true legend in our field and a mentor of mine. It inspires me to do even more to serve the SERC community in the future.

In her presentation titled, A State-Based Probabilistic Risk Assessment Framework for System-of-Systems Operations, Sinha Roy argues that a system of systems (SoS) has complex failure modes due to the interactions among systems and the cascading effects of system-level disruptions. She proposed a state-based framework for SoS risk assessment, which can be useful for various aerospace applications. The framework was demonstrated for a part of the Mars Sample Return program.

Sinha Roy received the Dr. Barry Boehm Award for Doctoral Student Research Excellence, the SDSF’s award for best research presentation. She is proud to have received such a significant recognition at her first SDSF presentation.

Purdue AAE PhD student Sonali Sinha Roy

“It was a privilege to be able to present my work to so many knowledgeable peers and distinguished experts in the field of Systems Engineering. As a student who is relatively new to systems engineering, I am constantly learning new things and trying to improve my dissertation research in the hope that I might be able to make a meaningful contribution to this field,” Sinha Roy says.

“Winning this award gave me an additional boost of motivation to keep working toward that goal.”

Visit the SERC website for more information about Sinha Roy’s presentation and the Boehm award.