Whether you want to continue your career in industry or advance to an academic opportunity, WPI’s MS in Aerospace Engineering program provides the knowledge and research to help you follow your best path.
Our flexible program allows you to earn your degree on a part-time or full-time basis so you’ll be able to fit it around your current obligations. The program retains the robust educational opportunities to expand your knowledge and stimulate your creativity within research topics that might include electric propulsion or renewable energy.
You’ll specify your intent to pursue the non-thesis option program if you plan to pursue a career in industry after graduation, or the research-based thesis option if you plan to pursue a PhD in aerospace engineering. Our faculty advisors will work closely with you to find a path that helps you explore your interests and aligns with your career path.
Students in the MS program will study a curriculum based on three areas of study: fluids and propulsion, materials and structures, and dynamics and controls. Course work includes Advanced Fluid Dynamics, Turbomachinery, Spacecraft Propulsion, Heat Transfer, Mechanical Vibrations, Optimal Control of Dynamical Systems, Applied Finite Element Methods in Engineering, and Smart Materials.
You’ll choose from a non-thesis program if this will be your terminal degree or a thesis program if you plan to continue on to earn your PhD. You may switch your choice even if you are already enrolled in a program.
Students may use these academic planners to help determine their credits:
If you pursue the research-focused thesis option for your MS, you’ll have opportunities to work one-on-one with our faculty on their own projects and as they guide you toward your own independent research projects. Using equipment like portable wind tunnels and vacuum chambers, you’ll explore the relationship between the theory and practice of flight to inform your next level of research or to progress to your next step in industry.
You’ll find extensive well-funded, state-of-the-art aerospace facilities at WPI to enrich your research and learning opportunities.
Our labs:
In my teaching I bring fluid and aerodynamics experiments, including wind tunnels, into the classroom each day. Fundamental concepts are demonstrated in these experiments, and collected data is immediately compared to the theory and equations learned during lecture. Students see that they can use what they are learning in class to predict the behavior of aerospace systems. They then go on to design improved systems in MQP projects and during their careers.
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Prior to joining the faculty at WPI in 2001, I was a Senior Staff Engineer in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). My research at JPL included application of plasma sources for materials processing and the development of pulsed plasma and small-scale hydrazine thrusters. In the mission support area, I worked as the propulsion engineer for the Deep Space 3 Interferometer and Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) missions.
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Prior to joining the faculty at WPI in August 2015, I worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at California Institute of Technology. My research at Caltech focused on the development of a Granular Element Method (GEM) based force visualization technique for the study of 2D granular systems under impact loading. I examined of the role of granular fabric on the wave motion and formation of force chains in granular media.
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Nikolaos A. Gatsonis received an undergraduate degree in Physics at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Greece (1983), an M.S. in Atmospheric Science at the University of Michigan (1996), an M.S. (1987) and a Ph.D.
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Autonomous vehicles – aircraft, cars, rovers, over- and underwater vehicles that can move in the real world by themselves without human pilotage – have gained immense importance not only due to the broad spectrum of their potential military and civilian applications, but also due to the concurrent development of sensor technology and embedded systems that enable the realization of true autonomy.
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Professor Demetriou is very active with the Controls and Systems research community. He served as an Associate Editor in the IEEE Tr. on Automatic Control (2004-2007), in the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control (2009-2011), and in SIAM J. Control and Optimization (2009-present). He is also serving in the IEEE-Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board as an Associate Editor (1997-present). In 2003 he established the IEEE-CSS Technical Committee on Distributed Parameter Systems and served as his first chair (2003-2012).
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My research is aimed towards understanding fundamental aspects of reacting flows at thermodynamic conditions of relevance to aircraft, rocket, and automobile propulsion. Reacting flow phenomena occurring in engines are complicated as a result of turbulent flow, interaction with solid boundaries, and extreme thermodynamic conditions. In order to understand and simulate combustion phenomena under such conditions, there is a necessity to develop accurate chemical kinetic and molecular transport models in addition to fluid mechanics models.
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