Matthew Meister is in his 6th year in Mechanical Engineering and will be graduating this December.  In his line of research he works with Dr. Britney Schmidt on underwater vehicles and CubeSats, specifically mechanical design and system integration. For the underwater vehicle research he primarily focuses on Icefin, which is the vehicle Dr. Schmidt built using her startup funds. Matthew is the lead mechanical engineer on the vehicle and is responsible for the mechanical design and analysis. Currently he is working on a robotic arm that will be attached to Icefin and will have the capabilities to collect water samples as well as taking samples of the ice shelf from the underside and even sediment from the ocean floor. Icefin was nominated for GTRI’s 2014 Innovative Research Award.

This past spring Matthew performed research for CubeSat which was part of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) project to design a CubeSat that would be sent to Europa, an icy moon around Jupiter. He was the lead engineer for the spacecraft design team that came up with The Europa Plume and Exosphere CubeSat (EPEC). Matthew was also part of the group that flew out to JPL this summer and met with the engineers to present his team’s design. He also gave two conference presentations/posters this summer (AbSciCon - Chicago and IGS - Cambridge).

During his time at Georgia Tech, he was an undergrad researcher for Dr. Michael West at GTRI in 2013 and 2014, President of Wreck Racing in 2013 and developed a custom turbo kit for his team’s competition car that placed 5th at competition in 2014. In his spare time Matthew likes working on cars and cycling. Currently he is working on his 1995 Land Cruiser making some modifications for more extreme off road use. He is also training for a 100 mile bike ride, 6 Gap Century.