graduates:

Rachel is originally from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and earned her BS and MS degrees in aerospace engineering from ISU. She then spent two years in Atlanta, Georgia, working for Bruel & Kjaer, a Danish company that specializes in acoustic and vibration test equipment, after which she accepted a transfer opportunity to live and work in Darmstadt, Germany as an export manager, responsible for supporting the engineering and sales teams in North and South America. After a year and a half in Germany, working mainly in a project management capacity, she found a more engineering-oriented position as a design engineer at Etrema Products back in Ames working with Terfenol-D, a magnetostrictive iron alloy developed for the Navy for use in sonar devices. After seven years designing, building, and testing specialized solutions based on Terfenol-D technology, she accepted a position at Sauer-Danfoss, a hydraulic systems supplier also in Ames, as a technical support engineer, responsible for resolution of all technical issues between the product and application engineering teams for various pump and motor products. Rachel's current research area is in extra-terrestrial exploration/excavation vehicles, tying together her years of experience in dynamic systems modeling and her life-long interest in the aerospace sciences.