Abstract
HEDGE-2 Science PCB
My technical capstone project was part of HEDGE-2, the second iteration of the Hypersonic Reentry Deployable Glider Experiment, a student-run mission scheduled for NASA's RockSat-X in summer 2026. I was one of four students working on the science printed circuit board, the data collection board for the reentry vehicle.
Aerospace hardware rated to survive hypersonic reentry is expensive and puts this kind of research out of reach for many teams. UVA ran a version of this mission in 2025 and did not get any data back. HEDGE-2 is the second attempt. Our board will read temperature and pressure throughout the descent to capture what those conditions actually look like as the vehicle falls back through the atmosphere. That data, if recovered, would help establish whether commercially available components are worth using for future hypersonic and small satellite research.
The whole design came down to one constraint: once the vehicle separates from the rocket, nothing is fixable. Hypersonic reentry kills most electronics in seconds. The developed board has to work on the first attempt and keep collecting data until the vehicle is gone.
Embodied avatar presence and social connection in VRChat
My STS research looked at how avatar embodiment changes social connection in VR, using VRChat as a comparison point against traditional online gaming and in-person interaction. I ran semi-structured interviews with five VRChat users inside the platform, so participants could show me the practices and spaces they were describing rather than reconstruct them from memory. Interviews covered VR history, avatar embodiment, relationship formation, physical interaction, and how participants compared social depth across all three contexts. I coded data and analyzed it thematically, with sociomateriality as the primary framework and affordances and copresence as supporting concepts.
The findings broke into three areas. VRChat relationships routinely move offline. Participants described flying across the country to meet people they'd first encountered in VR, and in some cases forming long-term romantic partnerships that eventually became shared physical lives. People didn't talk about VR as a substitute for real connection; IRL meetups were more like a natural endpoint once a relationship got serious enough. Several participants stated it as a personal rule.
Avatars are both genuine self-expression and real-time performance. Users keep consistent identity markers across years while adjusting their appearance and behavior depending on context and company, whether through full avatar switches or toggles and sliders within a single one. Prior research tends to treat avatar identity as either stable self-representation or idealized projection. This study argues it's better understood as situational practice.
The anonymity that enables both of those things cuts both ways. It produces unusual honesty, lowers social barriers, and opens up identity exploration that participants said wasn't available to them elsewhere. It also makes accountability nearly impossible. The platform's design doesn't address harassment well, so users have mostly handled it themselves: blocking, using world-selection as a consent signal, and building consent frameworks informally rather than inheriting them from the platform.
