AIAA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Zarem Graduate Student Awards for Distinguished Achievement.
The winners will receive their awards at the 2026 AIAA SciTech Forum, Orlando, Florida, 12–16 January 2026. This award was established by AIAA Honorary Fellow Abe Zarem, founder and managing director of Frontier Associates, to annually recognize graduate students in aeronautics and astronautics who have demonstrated outstanding scholarship in their field.
Patrick Eid is a Graduate Teaching and Research Assistant in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Auburn University. He is a member of the Advanced Propulsion Research Lab directed by Professor Joseph Majdalani. Eid holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Notre Dame University (NDU). He has distinguished himself through leadership roles as Secretary of the ASME Student Chapter, Treasurer of the Astronomy Club, and Deputy Secretary General of the Model United Nations Program. His prior accolades include global honors at NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge and top distinctions in the ASME EFx Oral Presentation Competition at NDU and the 2025 AIAA Region II Student Conference.
Eid’s faculty advisor, Joseph Majdalani, is the Francis Chair of Excellence in Aerospace Engineering at Auburn University. An AIAA Fellow, he is recognized for pioneering work in acoustic instability and cyclonic-engine technology. With over 350 publications and 21,000 citations, he ranks in the top 0.8% of aerospace researchers globally. His breakthroughs include new cyclonic, vorticoacoustic, asymptotic, computational, similarity, stability, boundary-layer, and high-speed flow formulations. He is known for coauthoring Viscous Fluid Flow with Frank White while cracking the Pohlhausen paradox on its centennial anniversary. Besides 27 Best Papers, his main accolades include the Walker Teaching, Spencer Mentorship, Wyld Propulsion, Von Kármán Lectureship, Research Excellence, Abe Zarem Educator (4 times), Book Author, Outstanding Graduate Mentor, Leland Atwood Educator, Sustained Service, Foundation Faculty Advisor, Dannenberg Educator, Hap Arnold, Ralph Teetor Educator, Marquette Outstanding Teacher (twice), and CAREER Awards.
Luke Busse received Bachelor of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering Technology and Engineering Management from Bluefield State University, WV, in 2022, and a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2025. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati under the supervision of Manish Kumar. Busse’s research interests include autonomous navigation and control of uncrewed aerial vehicles, machine learning, and multi-sensor fusion. His research is focused on hardware and software development of UAV systems capable of navigating in previously unknown environments where GPS is unreliable or unavailable while processing real-time data for mission-critical applications to achieve autonomous operation.
His faculty advisor, Manish Kumar, received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University. After serving as a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, the U.S. Army Research Office, and University of Pennsylvania, he started his career as a faculty member at University of Cincinnati (UC) in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering where he currently serves as a Professor and the Graduate Program Director. At UC, he directs Cooperative Distributed Systems (CDS) Laboratory, co-directs Industry 4.0/5.0 Institute, and co-directs Applied Autonomy Lab. His research interests include unmanned aerial vehicles, robotics, decision making and control in complex systems, AI, multi-sensor data fusion, swarm systems, and multiple robot control.
For more information on the Abe M. Zarem Graduate Awards for Distinguished Achievement, please contact Merridith Kauten, at [email protected]g or 703.264.7503.
