AAE Grad Students Diane Craig, Amanda Knutson, and Farhana Pervin receive 2010 Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship

The Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowships were established in 1938 in honor of Amelia Earhart, famed pilot and Zonta club member. The Fellowships are granted annually to women pursuing graduate Ph.D./doctoral degrees in aerospace-related sciences and aerospace-related engineering.

2010 Recipients

Diane Craig Davis is currently a PhD student in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue. After receiving an MS degree from the University of Texas, Diane went on to work in the Navigation Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for three years. She received recognition and awards for her contributions in support of numerous spacecraft missions including Mars Express and Genesis. Diane’s field of study for her PhD program in AAE at Purdue is interplanetary spacecraft trajectory design and mission planning. Her main focus is on the development of a strategy that incorporates multiple gravity fields and facilitates the design of spacecraft trajectories in these complex dynamical regimes.

Amanda Knutson is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering, at Purdue University, west Lafayette, IN. Amanda earned her B.Sc. (May 2005) degree in Mechanical Engineering at Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She continued her studies at Queen's and received her M.Sc. (May 2008) degree also in Mechanical Engineering where she specialized in the area of Dynamic Modeling. She began her Ph.D. studies at Purdue in the fall of 2008, under the guidance of Professor Kathleen Howell. Amanda's field of research is Astrodynamics, with her focus in the area of Attitude Dynamics and Mission Design.

Farhana Pervin is a graduate research assistant in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. She received her BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. After that, she joined the Tuskegee University Center for Advanced Materials Lab as a research assistant to pursue her MS degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2004. Then she moved to Purdue to continue her education as a PhD student and joined Professor Weinong Chen's research group. Her research field in the PhD program is mechanics of biological tissues. She developed an experimental technique to conduct high impact tests on soft materials. Her main focus is to study the dynamic behavior of brain tissues at a high strain rate to assess the traumatic brain injury (TBI).