Meet Graduate Student Engineer Laura Nash of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

At the EcoCAR2 Year 2 Competition, I met Laura Nash from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. (That’s her on the far left in the photo above.)

Laura is a graduate student who brings to the Rose-Hulman EcoCAR team experience in industry and key skills in finite-element analysis. She thanks our Global Technical Access Center for helping her get up to speed with NX Nastran, which she used to design the energy storage system (ESS) of their electric vehicle.

Check out our video interview:



Laura presented in a Women in Engineering session at the EcoCAR2 Competition. I am definitely seeing a higher percentage of women engaged in these student engineering competitions than we see in our industry today. Women like Laura do a great job reaching out to fellow females to encourage them to consider engineering.

Speaking of that, if you haven’t seen the Engineering America TedxTalk by Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, you should definitely take a look. She covers the broader issues facing engineering and engineering education but also speaks specifically to what inspired her to become an engineer (spoiler alert – it was another woman engineer!)



If you want to learn more about Gwynne, read the Los Angeles Times’ recent article: How I Made It: SpaceX exec Gwynne Shotwell. I’ll leave you with her final quote from that TedxTalk:

“Let’s continue to do cool things and inspire our youth.”