When Laura Smith-Velazquez was eight years old, her parents got her a telescope. The dark sky over Dorr, Mich., made for the perfect laboratory for Smith-Velazquez, an especially curious child. “I was fascinated with the sky,” she recalls. “It was so beautiful and I had so many questions.”
While space intrigued her enough to want to be an astronaut — which may happen if she is accepted into the Mars One program — Smith-Velazquez wanted to know everything about, well, everything. Though money was always short, her parents splurged on encyclopedias, which their daughter read from cover to cover, along with just about any other book she could get her hands on. “I became a massive bookworm,” says Smith-Velazquez, this year’s winner of the Technical Excellence Award.
Arguably, though, the most important lessons of Smith-Velazquez’s young life came from watching her parents and listening to her grandmother. “My grandma told me Cherokee stories about the Milky Way, and she built airplanes during World War II, which got me interested in aviation and space,” she says.
When she was 11, Smith-Velazquez’s dad got his GED and went on to pursue his college degree, which he received when he was 40. Though Smith-Velazquez’s mom never graduated from high school, she is well-read and worked her way up to becoming a quality control engineer. “My mom is such a strong woman and the sort who would say, where there is a will there is a way,” she says. “She provided such support to me at a young age.”
In many ways, Smith-Velazquez’s education was enhanced when she tagged along with her dad to Grand Valley State University and had to find ways to amuse herself while her father was studying or in class. Dressing up skeletons in lab coats and poring through college textbooks in the campus bookstore were favorite diversions.
Smith-Velazquez’s early fascination with space and aviation ultimately led her to pursue a degree at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. Money was so tight that she had to cajole a ride with a fellow student (whom she did not know) with just $20 in her pocket and a duffle bag of necessities from the dollar store. “I survived that first year eating off my roommates’ plates,” recalls Smith-Velazquez, who worked full time through college and was able to cobble together enough student loans to augment what she earned to pay for school. “It was a hard time, but it was an opportunity and I worked hard.”
The strength and persistence her mom taught her helped Smith-Velazquez obtain her BS in aeronautical science with minors in aviation weather– meteorology and aviation safety–aircraft accident investigation. She also earned commercial pilot and aircraft dispatcher certifications. Smith-Velazquez went on to earn an MS in human factors and systems engineering and began her career at Northrop Grumman.
It may sound like Smith-Velazquez has the kind of expansive education and training that are relevant to more than one position. But her recent role as a senior systems engineer-cognitive scientist for Raytheon Technologies/Collins Aerospace combines all her education, experience, and interests. “I used everything I went to school for,” she says. For the past six years, Smith-Velazquez has been working on making commercial supersonic jet travel commonplace. A big reason the fabled Concorde disappeared from commercial aviation is the noise pollution it generated — sonic booms just aren’t popular on the ground.
Along with NASA, Smith-Velazquez helped to implement an improved wave propagation algorithm that can be incorporated into a modern flight deck to allow pilots to plan and modify where (or even if) sonic booms hit the ground. “Pilots can use the technology to manage where their sonic boom goes, and if you can fly without the boom, you can enable the world to be smaller because jets can fly so much faster and over land,” she says. For instance, supersonic flight could trim three to six hours from a 16-hour journey between Asia and North America.
In many ways, Smith-Velazquez’s role was the natural destination for a precocious little girl who wanted to know everything about everything. “I’m the 20 questions girl,” she says. “[My work at Collins Aerospace] is a very creative form of engineering. I had to do validations and constantly evaluate my assumptions and update everything — a dream job.”
Helping Native students find their dream jobs in STEM is also a passion for Smith-Velazquez. A member of AISES since 2007, Smith-Velazquez is active in her Indigenous community in Baltimore, looks for mentoring opportunities, and speaks publicly about her own journey. For the past three years, she has been the Native American Affinity Group Lead for the Society of Women Engineers. “Being a Native American and a woman in science and engineering means you really need a support group. You’re a minority of a minority,” she says. “That’s what these groups do, and I try to help.”
