• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2026

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Aerospace Engineering & Innovation, Leadership, and Engineering Entrepreneurship, ‘28

• Mentor: TBD

• Brookie Mentor: TBD

Emily Kyroudis is a sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign pursuing dual degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Innovation, Leadership, & Engineering Entrepreneurship (ILEE). She has been fascinated by how things work since childhood — from building cardboard box rocket ships to growing up alongside NASA’s Curiosity rover. Emily is most herself when she’s building and understanding systems from the inside out, which draws her toward structures, advanced materials, and reusable launch vehicles.

As Structures Fabrication Lead on the Illinois Space Society’s high-power rocketry team, Spaceshot, Emily oversees the manufacturing and integration of composite two-stage rockets. Leading a team of over 50 members, she teaches foundational composite manufacturing techniques while fostering ownership and initiative across the subteam. She works closely with the structural design and analysis team to translate CAD into real life, ensuring performance, manufacturability, and cohesive subsystem integration. Recently, Emily helped construct the team’s two-stage minimum-diameter carbon fiber rocket that reached an apogee of 75,124 feet, breaking the university altitude record.

In parallel with hands-on fabrication, Emily conducts materials research focused on the cure kinetics of GC2 microcapsules in dicyclopentadiene (DCPD), studying how the dispersion of GC2 on carbon fibers affects the key characteristics of heat flow curves (including mass loss, peak temperature, onset temperature, and change in enthalpy). Her research supports the DARPA NOM4D project, which aims to develop technologies enabling energy-efficient, in-orbit fabrication of composite structures. Her work reflects a broader interest in advancing in-space manufacturing of aerospace materials.

Emily also served as her team’s Principal Investigator in NASA’s L’SPACE Proposal Writing and Evaluation Experience, selected to lead a multidisciplinary team in developing and pitching a novel technology for review by a NASA panel. The experience strengthened her systems-level thinking and deepened her interest in technology commercialization.

Outside of her engineering projects, Emily engages with UIUC’s start-up ecosystem and attended the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship Workshop, where she explored how early technical decisions shape scalability, reliability, and long-term impact. When Emily isn’t building rockets, she sings in Women’s Glee Club, practices Greek folk dance, and enjoys rock climbing.

This summer, Emily will join Rocket Lab as a Manufacturing Engineering Intern in Long Beach, California. As a Brooke Owens Fellow, she looks forward to learning from and contributing to a community shaping the future of aerospace exploration.