Alessandra Babuscia of Italy was the guest speaker at the Zonta Club of Quaboag Valley dinner meeting on October 18, 2010, 6pm. Ms. Babuscia is a 2010 recipient of the Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship Program. Established in 1938 in honor of Amelia Earhart, famed pilot and member of the Zonta Clubs of Boston and New York, the Fellowships are made annually to women pursuing graduate Ph.D./doctoral degrees in aerospace-related sciences and engineering.
Ms. Babuscia, a Research and Teaching Assistant in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will use her fellowship to conduct analyses to improve the current approach to space system modelling and optimization. Her research focuses on quantifying and minimizing the uncertainties in the evolution design. She has already created a probabilistic model of the mass evolution at the component level, and has applied this methodology to the problem of deciding the optimal set of instruments that will constitute the payload of a Lunar mission currently proposed at NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After graduation, she intends to continue in research and development, preferably working in system concept generation to help the design of innovative space missions.
