Draper Intern Aims to Build Lunar Lander as Brooke Owens Fellow

CAMBRIDGE, MA—This fall, thanks to a Brooke Owens Fellowship, Jade Minh Nguyen will help pioneer commercial space travel as a bioengineer intern at Draper. She is one of 40 women to earn this type of opportunity under the Fellowship program.

Brooke Owens Fellows are selected for their professional aptitude, their creativity, their leadership ability and their commitment to serving their communities. Nguyen and her fellow “Brookies” are considered rising stars in the aerospace industry.

Nguyen has been developing prototype display screens to support the Dynetics team working on NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) mission. The screens are being designed for use by astronauts on the next Moon landing.

At Stanford University, Nguyen is a member of the Stanford Student Space Initiative. She also participates in a bridge program for low-income and first-generation college students at Stanford called the Leland Scholars Program. Her honors include being named a Jack Kent Cooke scholar and a Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America scholar.

Originally from St. Peters, Missouri, Nguyen said her internship revealed a good deal of what astronauts need in a spacecraft and reinforced her decision to go into space medicine. “I was able to talk to a flight surgeon astronaut and came away thinking, ‘space medicine really is the new frontier.’”

Danielle DeLatte, a Draper engineer who leads the displays and controls team for the Dynetics HLS, said, “Jade’s internship was designed around her interest in space medicine, and it went so well we extended it. As our first Brooke Owens Fellow, Jade fit right into the team.”

Since 1973 the company has sponsored its own Draper Fellow Program, which has supported more than 1,000 graduate students pursuing advanced degrees in engineering and the sciences.