My academic background starts at my home country Brazil, in which I took part of an innovating program called American Academy, a partnership between Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUC-PR) and Kent State University in which students have two years of Kent State professors teaching at Brazil. After finishing my two years at the program, I got my Associate of Science degree and moved to the United States to further pursue my academic goals in Aerospace Engineering at Kent State University College of Aeronautics and Engineering. I rapidly got involved in the university High-Powered Rocket Team, for which I later became the propulsion team lead, and the vice-president, latter I became the senior engineer for propulsion as part of my capstone project to research, develop and manufacture custom solid motors.
While I am deeply fascinated by chemical rockets, I am especially drawn to propulsion technologies that can expand our capabilities beyond Earth orbit. My career goal is to be in the area of research and development. A major focus is electrical propulsion which still remains with some challenges and research opportunities, such as thruster scaling and power-levels and thrust-to-power trade-offs which I would like to address in order to improve efficiency, capacity and operational period of Hall thrusters for deep space exploration and transport. In parallel, I would like to explore more speculative propulsion ideas, such as electric sails or solar sails. Investigating how to scale and adapt such concepts and whether they can be hybridized.