Dean Romanchek

Mr. Dean Romanchek graduated from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2019 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. While at UIUC, he worked alongside Dr. Koki Ho to create a MATLAB design tool to automate and streamline the isolation and design of monolithic spacecraft subsystems with minimal user input. This program integrates each subsystem into a personalized small satellite to create an independent, self-sustaining space station as a platform for low-cost solutions for geostationary science missions. Dean also served successively as Secretary, Chief Mechanical Engineer, Project Manager, President, and as a Consulting Engineer for Illinois Robotics in Space (IRIS), an organization specializing in designing, building, and testing small automized remote mining vehicles for NASA’s annual Robotic Mining Competition (RMC). Under his leadership, IRIS placed first for systems engineering in two consecutive years. During his senior year, Dean developed and taught a course designed to enable engineering underclassmen to develop mastery over the computational programming language MATLAB and was subsequently voted among the top eight teachers in the Aerospace Department for Spring 2019. After graduating from UIUC and before starting his Masters at Rice, he worked full time at CU Aerospace to assist in completing his undergraduate DARPA research project on both the commercial and student sides. Dean has chosen to enroll in the Professional Science Master's program in Space Studies in order to obtain a career in the space industry.