Outreach & education
Building the next generation of aerospace talent
From community-college internships to K–12 robotics, our teams open research labs to students at every stage.
- Community college
- 1 program
- Graduate
- 1 program
- Undergraduate
- 1 program
- High school
- 3 programs
- K–12
- 3 programs
NVCC summer research internships
Each summer, four Northern Virginia Community College students join GWU’s lab as research interns, working side by side with graduate students on drone control-link security. The 2025 cohort built a software-in-the-loop testbed for MAVLink security; the 2026 cohort built the GridEye UTM monitor and presented posters at the project’s annual review.
Undergraduate research at Vanderbilt
The Vanderbilt team has included six undergraduate students in its research, giving them their first research experiences and, for some, their first scholarly publications. Two have gone on to NASA-relevant internships and job placements, on Blue Origin’s lunar lander team and in rocket propulsion firmware and RF communications for atmospheric reentry at SpaceX.
Industry research internships at Collins Aerospace
Collins Aerospace hired a Vanderbilt University student as a summer research intern in 2025 and again in 2026. In the 2026 internship, the student formalized manipulative interference attacks in the Lean theorem prover against a representative small UAS architecture, as part of Collins’s formal security assessment work.
High-school research mentoring
GWU graduate students mentor high-school researchers on projects such as using large language models for air traffic safety assessment, benchmarking speech-to-text models on air traffic control audio, and reconstructing 3D neighborhoods from drone video. One student was first author of a paper at AIAA Aviation 2026.
Hands-on autonomy demonstrations at TSU
TSU’s Intelligent Tactical Mobility Robotics Lab hosted middle-school, high-school, and rising-freshman students for demonstrations of UAV platforms, AI, robotics, virtual simulation, and edge computing.
Del Valle AutoDrive Lab Internship
A partnership between Del Valle ISD and UT Austin’s Center for Autonomy. Over seven hands-on lessons, high-school students progressed from RC-car hardware and basic electronics to Raspberry Pi programming, soldering, motor control, and autonomous-vehicle testing, supported by a 16-person team contributing more than 200 hours.
STEM Girl Day at UT Austin
At a large K–8 event organized by Women in STEM at UT Austin, team members led activities building robotic hands from paper and string, programming RC cars in Python, and encoding names in binary with bracelets, alongside 3D-printing demonstrations.
Austin Public Library Tween Code Club
A UT Austin team member supported a four-session series in Fall 2025, in which students ages 9–12 progressed from Scratch toward Python, and four more sessions in Spring 2026 involving programming and machine-learning classification.
ROADS “From Earth to Venus” challenge
Student teams programmed rovers to traverse uneven terrain and collect sensor data in a simulated planetary environment, hosted by UT Austin’s Center for Space Research.