Oxford Engineers awarded Amelia Earhart Fellowship two years running

DPhil candidate Suria Subiah (Oxford Thermofluids Institute) has been awarded a Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship. The US$10,000 Fellowship is awarded annually to up to 30 women pursuing doctoral degrees in aerospace engineering and space sciences. Another Engineering Science DPhil, Hannah Rana (Space Cryogenics group), was awarded the Fellowship in 2019.

The Fellowships were established in 1938 in honour of Amelia Earhart, for women who demonstrate a superior academic record conducting research applied to aerospace engineering or space sciences.

Suria’s research area is hypersonic flows, under the supervision of Professor Matthew McGilvray and Dr Luke Doherty at the Oxford Thermofluids Institute. She is working on the EPSRC funded programme ‘Transpiration Cooling for Gas Turbines and Hypersonic Vehicles’.

She says, “I work on the Oxford T6 Stalker Tunnel [Europe's highest speed wind tunnel], specifically looking at very high speed flows and extreme temperature effects experienced by hypersonic vehicles like scramjets and re-entry vehicles. Last year I worked on commissioning the tunnel in a new mode of operation called Reflected Shock Tunnel Mode and presented my research at the International Planetary Probe Workshop (Oxford, UK) and the International Conference on Flight Vehicles, Aerothermodynamics and Re-Entry Missions & Engineering (Monopoli, Italy)”.

"Awards such as the Amelia Earhart Fellowship are a wonderful way of bringing the contributions of female scientists and researchers to the forefront"

Suria adds, "I am extremely honoured to receive this award and for my research to be highlighted. I hope that this will inspire other young women who are interested in pursuing a career in aerospace engineering and space sciences. It is a wonderful, challenging and exciting field to go in to and working in an environment like the Oxford Thermofluids Institute is a truly amazing experience. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a supportive lab group and to have superb supervisors and mentors, as well as a really encouraging network of female researchers at Oxford. Although there is much work to be done about the shortage of women in science fields, awards such as the Amelia Earhart Fellowship are a wonderful way of bringing the contributions of female scientists and researchers to the forefront, which will hopefully serve as inspiration for more young women to pursue a career in aerospace engineering."