Overview
Grace Genszler earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in May 2018 with a minor in Mathematics. Through a dual degree program with Dartmouth College, she also earned a Bachelor of Engineering with a concentration in Computational Sciences in June 2019. After taking a gap year to work in an artisanal bakery, Grace joined the Space Imaging and Optical Systems laboratory, run by Professor Dmitry Savransky, to do research on distributed space systems in the fall of 2020 as a Ph.D. student in Aerospace Engineering. Her research focuses on the dynamics of starshade-telescope space-based observatories and mission planning for direct imaging exoplanet observations. She is a Matthew Isakowitz Fellow, as well as a recipient of a NASA New York Space Grant Fellowship.
For her honors thesis at Wheaton, she studied the numerical modeling of tethered satellite system dynamics. At Dartmouth, she worked on a design for a Martian greenhouse to support a crewed mission for her capstone. This project won NASA’s 2019 BIG Idea Challenge. Grace was also part of Cornell’s inaugural SmallSat Mission Design School where she developed a mission concept to characterize the lunar environment at radio frequencies. As a Matthew Isakowitz Fellow, she interned at Virgin Orbit. There, she worked on the propulsion stages team by modeling the propellant budgets and the mission design team by doing trajectory optimization work.