UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Matthew Krull, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Penn State, was recently awarded a four-year fellowship with NASA’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program.
The program develops technologies and capabilities for new aircraft systems, including fuel burn, noise, emissions and safety, with a focus on enabling new aircraft to fly safer, faster, cleaner, quieter and more efficiently.
The fellowship includes full tuition, a monthly stipend and an annual 10-week summer internship with a NASA research group. Krull also will be matched with a technical adviser from NASA and will belong to a professional learning community of other fellows and their faculty advisers, as well as NASA researchers, scientists and subject matter experts.
“I want to acknowledge my adviser for all of his support, as well as my lab mates for their assistance when I first started,” Krull said. “I am very happy to receive this prestigious NASA fellowship. It will allow me to dive deeper into compressible flow physics and develop a novel measurement technique. I am very excited to work with brilliant people at both NASA and Penn State.”
Krull is advised by Stephen Lynch, professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State.
“Matthew is one of the most highly motivated graduate students I have had the pleasure of advising,” Lynch said. “In his first year of research in my group, he learned how to operate our transonic cascade facility, supported multiple federal and industry research projects, mentored two undergraduate researchers and wrote two peer reviewed conference papers. Matthew is always thinking of the next best thing to try, which will serve him well in this fellowship. I am extremely proud of him and expect that in very short order he will be advising me on his research!”
Krull earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State Behrend in 2022, where he was a member of the Behrend Honor’s Program and the Lambda Sigma Honor Society. He went on to earn a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State in 2024. Krull’s research focuses on using experimental methods to understand and characterize the physics of turbine blade cooling and aerodynamics. With NASA, Krull will work within the Commercial Supersonic Technology Project group.
This summer, Krull will make periodic site visits to NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio as part of his 10-week annual internship, where he will gain relevant research experience and support NASA’s ongoing research activities.
“This fellowship will allow me to explore high-speed flow physics in detail and develop necessary instrumentation technology that can be applied to many aerospace applications of interest to NASA,” Krull said. “My hope is that it will help propel my success in obtaining a doctorate and eventually becoming a professor.”