Victoria Arias & Tanya Liu
Victoria Arias is currently in her 2nd year in the Mechanical Engineering PhD program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While pursuing her BS in Applied Mathematics at the University of California Merced, Victoria took a year off to participate in four consecutive internships at NASA Langley Research Center, where she studied space radiation shielding materials. Now, as a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) Fellow, she is studying heat shield materials. Throughout her career, Victoria hopes to contribute towards materials and technologies for safe transportation and habitats for future long-term space missions.
Tanya Liu grew up in Ames, Iowa and attended Ames High School, where she was a member of the band, orchestra, and school newspaper. She went on to earn her B.S in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D from Stanford University. Currently, she is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford studying heat transfer and water desalination.