Grace Ra Kim

Grace Ra Kim
Harvard University
Aerospace Engineering and Robotics
Senior
Gaithersburg, MD

Grace Kim (김나은) grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and is finishing her BSc degree in Engineering Sciences with a focus on Aerospace and Robotics from Harvard University. Throughout her time as an undergraduate student, she served as President of the Harvard College Engineering Society, and President of PRIMUS, the First-Generation Low-Income Student Union. By working as a Chief Engineer on the Harvard Satellite Team, she gained a love for aerospace, which she cultivated further through experiences at SpaceX, MITRE, Code for America, Kayhan Space, and the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory. The cube satellite she helped construct with the Harvard Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) was recently selected for launch through the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative. For her senior thesis, she worked on designing a Guidance, Navigation, and Control subsystem for the CaliPER cube satellite to calibrate the REASON antenna on NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s (JPL) Europa Clipper spacecraft. In her path to becoming an engineer, Grace attributes much of her growth, creativity, and optimism to her father’s teachings, which embodied the ideology that creativity can come from the most unexpected places. Grace also has a patent under her name and she has worked as a Data Scientist Community Fellow at Code for America, spending 10 months assisting local governments in the U.S. in effectively addressing delivery inequities in underserved areas. She hopes to one day establish her own startup in satellite communication and control systems that would make broadband networks not only available but affordable to remote and rural communities. After her time at Harvard, Grace will pursue a Master’s in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar.