NASA, Industry Interns Soar in Summer 2025 Internships

North Carolina Space Grant is pleased to announce the Summer 2025 class of interns. They completed summer-long projects with real-world applications and implications at Collier Aerospace in Raleigh and multiple NASA centers across the country.

Each year, NC Space Grant collaborates with NASA centers, industry partners, and research organizations to provide hands-on research experiences to higher-education students through meaningful internships. This year, NC Space Grant awarded eight interns.

“Internships are vital to workforce development. They give students the chance to build skills, gain meaningful experience, and take important steps toward future careers,” says Jobi Cook, associate director of NC Space Grant and manager of the intern program.

2025 NASA Interns

Taylor Ligon is a sophomore at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University studying physics. For her summer internship, she worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, analyzing the duration of gamma-ray bursts.

Jack Deucher recently graduated from NC State University with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science. This summer, he interned at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where his research focused on AI coding.

Raina Gandhi is a junior at NC State studying mechanical engineering. During her summer internship at NASA Ames Research Center in California, she modeled helicopter downwash—the powerful airflow created during takeoff and landing.

Owen Deen is a recent graduate from UNC Wilmington, where he majored in mathematics, computer science, and statistics. This summer, while interning with the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, he worked on developing a tool that uses large language models to help trend engineering data from NASA’s Roman Space Telescope. This fall, he is starting his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and scientific computing at the University of Maryland.

Varun Surti is a senior at NC State University studying aerospace engineering. This summer, he worked as a Spaceport Integration Intern at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. His project, “Spaceport Integration: Digital Twin.”

Collier Aerospace Interns

John Gillespie is a Master’s student at NC State studying aerospace engineering. As an intern at Collier Aerospace in Raleigh, he: put together stress reports; analyzed modes of various types of composite aerospace structures and vehicles; and optimized and sized the same structures/vehicles.

Cora Dally is a senior studying aerospace engineering at NC State University. Dally is a propulsion team member in NC State’s Liquid Rocketry Lab and interned at Collier Aerospace in Raleigh this summer.

Will Sonis is a Master’s student in mechanical engineering at NC State. As an intern at Collier Aerospace in Raleigh, he took on a primary role on a new aircraft project, providing a firsthand look at the design process and analyses and considerations that go into various structural decisions.