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Fujiwara wins SAE Doctoral Engineering Scholarship

Amy Sprague
October 17, 2018

I think winning this scholarship is linked to my prior participation in the SAE Aero Design competitions as an undergrad. – Gustavo Fujiwara
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Gustavo Fujiwara

 

UW Aeronautics & Astronautics Ph.D. student Gustavo Fujiwara won one of only two 2018 SAE Doctoral Engineering Scholarships. This scholarship recognizes and provides financial support to students pursuing doctoral degrees in engineering who demonstrate strong academic achievement and leadership skills. The total of 36 graduate and undergraduate scholarships were awarded from a pool of over 2,500 applicants.

Says Fujiwara, “I think winning this scholarship is linked to my prior participation in the SAE Aero Design competitions as an undergrad. This experience was very valuable in giving us the opportunity to experience a real-world design challenge simulating a typical aircraft development program from conceptual design to flight testing. It also gave us leeway to try unconventional approaches to aircraft design and innovate with multidisciplinary design optimization algorithms that helped us adjust to the changing mission and constraints of the competition.” Indeed, his undergraduate team from the University of Sao Paulo, participating over several years, won first place in both the national and international competitions, secured the NASA Systems Engineering Award for Best Aircraft Design, and broke the competition’s record for heaviest payload.

Fujiwara currently works with A&A Professor and College of Engineering Dean Michael Bragg and A&A Professor Eli Livne in the field of Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) applied to aircraft design. Their research targets ways to improve the design of future-generation aircraft by developing a more integrated optimization framework to ultimately increase aircraft fuel efficiency.