Jose Bernardo will be honored at the Council of University Transportation Centers awards in a January 2013 ceremony for being named a Department of Transportation (DOT) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Center of Excellence (COE) Outstanding Student of the Year. Jose is currently completing a Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology and conducts research for the FAA COE Partnership for Air Transportation Noise and Emissions Reduction under the direction of Drs. Dimitri Mavris and Michelle Kirby.

At the age of five, Jose moved with his family from Lima, Peru to the U.S., and he became a U.S. citizen in 2002. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2008, capping his undergraduate studies by flying a microgravity experiment on NASA's microgravity research vehicle. Jose accepted a Research Assistantship, and received an OMED Tower Award for academic excellence, and a Goizueta Foundation Fellowship award at Georgia Tech where he completed his M.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering in 2009.

Jose's doctoral thesis is entitled "Formulating and Implementing a Generic-Fleet-level Noise Methodology" and his COE research in this topic is supported through the FAA Office of Environment and Energy in Washington, DC. His work is closely related to fleet-level noise, expanding on the research previously conducted in this area. The goal of this thesis is to provide capabilities to simply and rapidly analyze a multitude of operational, technological, and policy scenarios with respect to noise at the fleet level, while providing proper tools, methods, and metrics to analyze and compare results, thus improving the ability to select noise mitigation strategies. In addition to his academic and research capabilities, Jose has demonstrated significant leadership ability while responsible for organizing and directing graduate research assistants, overseeing the lab, and contributing toward the completion of various COE research tasks. Jose has contributed to several reports submitted to the FAA regarding CO2 metric development, specifically, COE-PARTNER Project 30, "Metrics for an Aviation COO2 Standard".

Jose enjoys team sports, particularly soccer, and playing and learning to play musical instruments of all kinds.