Tomás Collado, a rising senior studying mechanical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named an Astronaut Scholar, one of the nation’s most prestigious STEM fellowships.
Collado is interested in designing alternate propulsion systems. (Courtesy photo)
As a scholar, Collado will attend the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation Innovators Symposium, receive a $15,000 scholarship, participate in the Michael Collins Family Professional Development Program and learn from astronauts and industry leaders.
At WashU, Collado has engaged in many space-related academic and co-curricular activities. Collado helped a team design a hypothetical mission to Neptune’s moon Triton for his course in planetary mission design, and he provided engineering support to a drone imaging research team in the class “Earth Remote Sensing Methods and Instrumentation.” Collado also serves as leader of the Recovery and Propulsion subteam for WU Rocketry, WashU’s NASA Student Launch Initiative team, and is an executive board member for the WashU Aviation Club.
In addition, Collado works as an assistant at the Crow Observatory on the Danforth Campus and has his private pilot’s license. This summer, he is working at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“My dream for the future is to put the engineering skillset I have developed through my academic and extracurricular experiences at WashU to use contributing to humanity’s future amongst the stars,” Collado wrote in his application.
