Outstanding Recent Alumni Awardee, 2023

Suman Sherwani studied electrical and computer engineering at the University of Iowa and graduated with honors in December 2019. Her senior design project and honors thesis project focused on the ICI-5 sounding rocket mission, which launched out of Svalbard, Norway, to study the northern lights. She and her team helped developed components of the magnetometer that flew on ICI-5.

Suman is now an avionics systems engineer at SpaceX, responsible for everything electrical and computer on the Dragon spacecraft, which takes astronauts, science instruments, and supplies to the International Space Station. She is responsible for avionics in all stages of development--from design and testing, all the way through launch operations in Mission Control. She was the responsible engineer for the Crew-4 mission, which took four astronauts to the International Space Station and for CRS-27, which took science experiments supplies and mouse-tronauts to the ISS. She was also selected for the Avionics Leadership Program.

Prior to joining SpaceX, she was a project manager and systems engineer on NASA Science Missions with the University of Iowa Physics and Astronomy Department. During her time there, she won the Forbes 30 under 30 for Science award in 2021.