My Background and Interests

At present, I am a Lecturer in Spacecraft Engineering at Queen Mary University of London in the UKMy QMUL page . Since entering academia in 2020, I have attempted to traverse the twofold research and education landscape in a manner that I think expands consciousness- mine as well as of those who work with me. This is especially the case (I’d like to think) for students and early career researchers.

Everything I learned about my academic field of expertise (classical mechanics and multibody dynamics) and its effective written communication was from the late Prof. Fidels O. EkeHis UC Davis obituary , a truly extraordinary scholar and gentleman. Towards the completion of my PhD, I was fortunate to be accepted by Dr. Abhi Jain to spend a year at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s DARTSLab, where his group works on fundamental aspects of computational/algorithmic multibody robot dynamics while applying them in the context of various NASA missions. This was followed by a postdocotoral appointment at the Surrey Space Centre- here, I drove research for SSTL and Airbus into developing missions, architectures, and technology development/demonstration plans for robotic in-space assembly while also driving development of lab-based technology demonstration testbeds. Here, again, my worldview was expanded by Prof. Craig Underwood, who possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of space missions while also being a `proper’ space engineer with a deep understanding of technologies across various spacecraft subsystems.

These experiences and mentors got me working in space robotics where my group works on fundamental engineering science-based know-hows towards realising futuristic space systems/technologies.

My Research and Pedagogic Philosophy: Tasteful engineering creativity via constructivist experimentation

My new approach to personal learning and pedagogic growth bears some parallels to Papert’s constructivist philosophy. My interpretation of this is that intuition and interest comes from experimenting with new and previously unknown interactive tools, much like a child playing with an ever-expanding collection of toys, to enhance their understanding of a topic. My belief is that this leads to one eventually uncoveringIn some cases, even discovering. their interests, which I see as an important precursor to developing taste. I am writing this while reflecting on the efforts of some extraordinary students who, over the Summer of 2024, collectively created an online textbook on Spacecraft Dynamics¹ based on previous handwritten lecture notes.

For students, I like to emphasise exploration-based learning, which deviates from the conventions of formal academia that are examination-focused (as much as one can do this within formal academia). The dangers of eschewing exploration in education is bearing the anti-fruit in the extant STEM research model where group leaders are focused on enhancing publication metrics by collecting more publications in a bid to raise personal research productivity indicesA classic case of Goodhart’s law. My issue is that these metrics are not an effective measure of the true outputs from academia- the career of advisees ². Of course, this presumes advisees must also be self-motivated to grow their opportunities. . My conclusion is that a lot of today’s professoriate are not too different from philatelists³ but a potential answer lies in updating incentive structures. Or at least clarifying them; a funder should make clear if it wants only journal papers as outputs. Similarly, a university there shiuld be incentives for generating well documented tools and high-quality datasets.

Footnotes

1. The students built on prior introductory knowledge of Python (nothing fancy), \(\LaTeX\), and Markdown but more importantly some of them learned how reviewing pull requests works. Some of them were able to teach their friends- via videos and remote pair programming- how to make contributions without my direct supervision. In the process, this team also taught me about sensibly coordinating a larger Github project while flying by the seat of my pants. I would like to think that we all grew a bit- I did! ↩

2. Can one teach another how to love something? ↩

3. A commentary will be needed from me to clarify this position, at some point- I do believe that documentation is important and inherently valuable in STEM. However, it is more important to train future scientists to be care about high quality written communication, not quantity alone. Perverse metrics can drive perverted behaviours. ↩