MSU aerospace duo earn gold

STARKVILLE, Miss. - Mississippi State University aerospace engineer professor Rani Sullivan and MSU graduate Leeanna Meadows have been named recipients of the 2018 George Stephenson Gold Medal awarded for the best original paper published by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. The duo received the honor for the co-authored paper entitles “Distributed optical sensing in composite laminates” that was published in the Journal of Strain Analysis for Engineering Design. Meadows, a Grenada, Miss., native was a graduate student under Sullivan at the time of the research paper. She currently works at Dynetics in Huntsville, Ala., and holds a 2015 bachelor’s and 2017 master’s degree from MSU. Co-authors also included Kevin Brown and Vipul Ranatunga of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, and Keith Vehorn and Steven Olson of the University of Dayton Research Institute. The paper focuses on research efforts using fiber optics to develop structural health monitoring techniques for composite aerospace designs. Research for the paper was conducted during a summer fellowship at the Air Force Research Laboratory. (Source: MSU 02/01/19)