Rachel Haga has won the Sigma Xi Best Undergraduate Research Award, for research done during 2011. Rachel completed her undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech in the Spring of 2011, and did research for two years during her undergraduate studies, first analyzing spacecraft reliability and multi-state failures, then moving on to issues in accident causation and system safety. She has authored or co-authored to date two journal papers, one book chapter, and one conference paper.

One of her research topics introduced Epidemiology, the basic science of public health, to the aerospace and reliability engineering communities. Epidemiology investigates the distribution, frequency, rates, and drivers of health-related states and illnesses in specific populations. Rachel’s work adopted some of Epidemiology’s concepts and approaches, and instead of human population and diseases, it focused on a satellite population and its on-orbit anomalies and failures. She conducted a retrospective cohort study of geosynchronous satellite anomalies and failures, and developed a health scorecard for each spacecraft subsystem, synthesizing its track record of on-orbit failure events. The results allowed the comparison of the propensity and severity of failure events between different spacecraft subsystems, and highlighted the troublesome subsystems that would benefit most from reliability improvements.

The full article can be accessed through the Georgia Tech library website, and the abstract can be found here.

Rachel was advised by Dr. J. H. Saleh. The Sigma Xi research society and the award selection committee are gratefully acknowledged.