At the ripe old age of 31, Matt barely qualifies as a young member, and is serving as the Young Members Director for 1999. Matt has been an active member of the San Francisco Section since early 1994 when he began working on an event to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11.
The Fermented Fluid Mechanics Forum and Edison Network are two of Matt's current projects with the AIAA and you should definitely check them out if you're into creating your own inventions, hearing about current aerospace topics and sampling fine microbrews.
Matt is an aerospace engineer in the Automation Concepts Research Branch at NASA Ames Research Center. His current work deals with aircraft trajectory intent modeling, and determining trajectory prediction accuracy as a function of atmospheric modeling accuracy. Matt has also recently worked on the conceptual design for the guidance and navigation system of a Mars Airplane proposal.
Matt is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at Stanford University, and the subject of his dissertation is optimal air traffic control. Matt earned his Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1992 after earning his Bachelor of Science degree at the same university. Prior to Washington, Matt spent two years studying aerospace engineering at Boston University. Matt also spent three months of 1992 at the University of Technology in Aachen, Germany , in an engineering internship program.
Matt was awarded the AIAA's 1995 Abe M. Zarem Award for Distinguished Achievement in Astronautics for his graduate work at the University of Washington. For this award, Matt was sent to the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) Congress in Jerusalem, Israel, to present his work entitled, "A Feedback Controlled Gas Mixing System for the Ram Accelerator."
For more information, have a look at Matt's Resume.