Rachel Sun

Rachel Sun is currently a Graduate Research Assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focused on architected materials within the Portela Research Group, while also serving as a Graduate Research Fellow for the National Science Foundation since September 2021. Prior experience includes a Mechanical Engineering Internship at Tesla, where responsibilities included designing and testing contactor devices and conducting magnetics simulations, and roles at Caltech as an Undergraduate Researcher, where experimental materials were developed. Other internships were completed at Northrop Grumman, where verification plans and Python automation for requirements metrics were created, and at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where landing gear for Europa was designed and tested. Rachel holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Caltech and is pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering at MIT.