Joshua Eckels
University of Michigan
PhD student in Aerospace Engineering
About me
I am currently pursuing a PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. My research is focused on predictive modeling and uncertainty quantification for electric propulsion applications. Member of the Joint Advanced Propulsion Institute (JANUS), a NASA space technology research institute pursuing high-power electric propulsion thrusters for deep-space missions.
Education
University of Michigan, PhD Aerospace Engineering2021-2026
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, BS Mechanical Engineering2021
Experience
Computational Autonomy Lab, Ann Arbor, MICurrent
PhD student
- Bayesian methods, uncertainty quantification, Hall thrusters
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA2025
Electric propulsion intern
- Hall thruster simulations, reduced-order modeling, data-driven acceleration
NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, OH2024
Electric propulsion intern
- Hybrid particle-in-cell modeling, spacecraft interactions
Tesla, Palo Alto, CA2021
High-voltage firmware intern
- Test automation, high-voltage controllers, battery firmware
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM2020
R&D engineering intern
- Ultrasonic wavefield imaging, computer vision, nondestructive evaluation
Assistive Robotics Lab, Blacksburg, VA2019
Undergraduate researcher
- Robotic navigation, computer vision, accessibility constraint mapping
News
| July 2025 | Article pre-print available on arXiv entitled "Uncertainty quantification of a multi-component Hall thruster model at varying facility pressures." |
| March 2025 | Presentation at SIAM CSE in Fort Worth, TX on work entitled "Adaptive Surrogate Modeling of Coupled Hall Thruster Plasma and Plume Simulations." |
| Sep 2024 | Article published in the Journal of Electric Propulsion entitled "Hall thruster model improvement by multidisciplinary uncertainty quantification." |
| June 2024 | Presentation at the International Electric Propulsion Conference (IEPC) in Toulouse, France on work entitled "Dynamic mode decomposition for particle-in-cell simulations of a Hall thruster and plume." |
| Feb 2024 | Presentation at SIAM UQ in Trieste, Italy on work entitled "Surrogate-Enabled Inference of High-Dimensional Systems Through Dimension Reduction: Applications to Fluid Plasma Simulations." |
| April 2023 | NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity (NSTGRO) fellowship awarded for research on "Multifidelity reduced-order modeling of particle-in-cell simulations for anomalous transport closure models." |
| Jan 2023 | Presentation at AIAA SciTech in Orlando, FL on work entitled "Optimal experimental design to learn reduced-fidelity models for porous electrosprays." |
| Nov 2022 | Los Alamos ASSESS project wins R&D100 award in San Diego, CA for work on ultrasonic imaging for nondestructive evaluation. |
| June 2022 | Presentation at the International Electric Propulsion Conference (IEPC) in Boston, MA on work entitled "Simulation-based surrogate methodology of electric field for electrospray emitter geometry design and uncertainty quantification." |
| Aug 2021 | Joined the JANUS institute at Michigan to support research on ground testing limitations of high-power electric propulsion systems. |
| May 2021 | Featured at Rose-Hulman's MakerLab for creating a mechanical chess robot based on the Stockfish chess engine. |
| Feb 2021 | Presentation at SEM IMAC on work entitled "Application of a U-Net Convolutional Neural Network to Ultrasonic Wavefield Measurements for Defect Characterization." |