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T. Bumbary

00 / Identification

Turner
Bumbary

Aerospace engineer working where flight test meets autonomy.

U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant and test engineer. Caltech BS Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech MS Aerospace Engineering.

Portrait pending
Fig. 01 — Las Vegas, NV

02 / Projects

Selected work

Explore the portfolio

Flight test / Autonomy

Georgia Tech · ARE Lab

Counter-UAS aerial capture

Led development of an autonomous drone designed to intercept and capture aircraft, from simulation through developmental flight test.

MATLAB/Simulink and Gazebo simulations baselined capability and tuned cascaded flight controllers. Flight testing revealed actuator delay, motor saturation, and integrator windup that simulation did not show.

  • GNC
  • MATLAB/Simulink
  • Gazebo
Read case study

Adaptive optics / Validation

NASA JPL

Adaptive mirror testing

Assembled and tested an adaptive mirror assembly for space telescopes, with piezoelectric actuators and strain gauges.

Designed the test procedure and an automated script to record curvature against mechanical stress, identifying nonlinearities in the mirror’s response.

  • Test procedures
  • Automation
  • Adaptive optics
Read case study

Mechanical design / Robotics

NASA JPL

LORNA Mars scout drone

Led mechanical design of LORNA, a long-range autonomous Mars scouting drone in research and development.

As the team’s only mechanical engineer, developed the design through rapid prototyping and team feedback, and designed the onboard sensor suite using sensor fusion.

  • Rapid prototyping
  • Sensor fusion
  • Mechanical design
Read case study

03 / Skills

Capabilities

Flight test & validation

Developmental flight testing, test procedures, and hardware characterization.

  • Flight test
  • Validation
Georgia Tech flight testing

GNC & autonomy

Cascaded flight controllers, autonomous aerial capture, and sensor fusion.

  • Controls
  • Autonomy
Counter-UAS research

Modeling & simulation

Flight simulation and thermal finite-element analysis of cryogenic instruments.

  • MATLAB/Simulink
  • Gazebo
  • ANSYS
  • SolidWorks
JPL thermal modeling

Mechanical design & prototyping

Mechanical development through rapid prototyping and iterative team feedback.

  • Mechanical design
  • Rapid prototyping
LORNA design work

Systems engineering

Satellite and ground-station network architecture and interface control documents.

  • ICDs
  • Network architecture
NRO systems work

04 / About

Turner, beyond the mission log

I’m an aerospace engineer and U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant serving as a test engineer in Las Vegas.

My interests sit at the intersection of aerospace, robotics, autonomy, and flight test. My research and internships have taken me through NASA JPL, Meta, the National Reconnaissance Office, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Georgia Tech’s Aerial Robotics and Experimental Autonomy Lab.

My work has spanned simulation and controller tuning, hands-on testing, mechanical design, and software integration.

Read the full biography

Fellowships & honors

  • Air Force STEM Scholar
  • GEM Fellow

Off the clock

  • Amateur pilot training
  • Long-distance running
  • Side projects

05 / Education

Engineering foundations

  1. 2024–2025

    MS Aerospace Engineering

    Georgia Institute of Technology

    Completed December 2025

  2. 2020–2024

    BS Mechanical Engineering

    California Institute of Technology

    Completed June 2024

02 / Ask the Assistant

Questions about Turner's experience

Answers come only from the content on this site. For anything else, contact Turner directly.