CAMPUS FEATURE
Historic Softball Season a Huge Hit The best season in the history of Embry-Riddle softball ended when the Eagles, ranked No. 24 and the reigning Cal Pac Champions, lost an elimination game to No. 8 Southern Oregon. During the year, the Eagles set program records for wins, conference wins and winning percentage. The team also had its share of individual standouts, including senior Danielle Jamieson, who won the Dr. Jim Davies Award as the women’s recipient of the California Pacific Conference’s Scholar-Athlete of the Year. Mikaeli Davidson, a senior who was the Cal Pac Player of the Year, also earned the CoSIDA NAIA Academic- All American Team Member of the Year award, while freshman Vanessa Brink was named the Cal Pac Pitcher of the Year and became the first Eagle freshman to win All-American Honorable Mention by the NAIA.
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND Eagles ASCEND to the Stratosphere
Vanessa Brink ’25
Global Security and Intelligence Studies
Last November, Eagles gained access to hands-on opportunities that few university students can add to their resumes: building and launching their own payloads into space. That’s precisely what Embry-Riddle’s Aerospace STEM Challenges to Educate New Discoverers (ASCEND) team did, aided by funding from the NASA Space Grant and in collaboration with Arizona Near Space Research as well as the Arizona Space Grant Consortium. ASCEND is comprised of students from various majors collaborating under the guidance of an experienced faculty mentor. With the freedom to choose a different research focus each semester, students gain practical engineering experience through a project that is entirely their own.
After a successful Spring ’21 semester investigating heat transfer and how temperature changes during a payload’s flight, last fall’s undergraduate researchers set a new goal: to stream live video of the payload as it embarked on a 100,000-foot journey to the stratosphere. The team designed multiple printed circuit boards (PCBs) to connect equipment and a ground station to receive the streaming data — experience that electrical engineering senior Nicodemus Phaklides says he wouldn’t have gotten without ASCEND. On November 20, 2021, the team held their breath and let their balloon fly on its ascent to the edge of space.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
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