Dr. Dora Musielak has a distinguished career in the aerospace industry and in academia characterized by many contributions through her scientific research, education, community service, and her devotion and tireless work in STEM education. She is a NASA Fellow, AIAA Associate Fellow, and the recipient of many recognitions.
Dr. Dora Musielak research areas range from high speed air breathing propulsion to advanced space propulsion and plasma rockets, to chaos in complex systems and fractal statistics. Her specialties include heat transfer, fluid mechanics, thermal sciences, turbulence and combustion. Her research strength is in her unique command of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and numerical modeling of the fundamental phenomena in high speed reacting flows for aero-space propulsion applications.
Dr. Musielak's career has spanned more than twenty years during which she has established a national and international reputation for contributions in high-speed propulsion, working at several aerospace companies including Northrop Grumman, MSE Technologies, and most recently for Allied Techsystems (ATK). She has been invited to lecture at universities in Mexico, Panama, Italy, England, Spain, and in the United States. She has presented her research at national and international conferences.
Dr. Musielak's accomplishments can be classified into three categories, namely, research, education, and service to the community.
* As a NASA Graduate Research Fellow, Dora Musielak demonstrated that magnetic insulation leads to an increased performance of plasma rockets by reducing the heat transfer to the nozzle walls. Later on, she showed that the injection of mixing of chemically reacting hypersonic flows could be controlled by special injection schemes in scramjet engines to power hypersonic vehicles. She was awarded a NASA Faculty Research Fellowship to carry out this work at NASA Langley. In her most recent work, Dr. Musielak investigated routes to chaos in coupled Duffing oscillators.
The list of Dr. Musielak's contributions to higher education is long. It includes establishing research and educational programs in hypersonics at UTA and in the industry, organizing and giving professional short courses for AIAA, disseminating results of research and progress in space exploration programs among students in schools and universities in Europe and Latin America, setting an initiative to expand focus of and leading AIAA undergraduate team engine design competitions, and working as a mentor with the ASME Young Engineers Committee.
Dr. Musielak's leadership is well recognized in the professional community. She is active with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), participating in conferences and meeting, working with several AIAA committees and chairing the Education Sub Committee of the Air Breathing Propulsion Technical Committee, and now she is the Communications chair of the High Speed Air Breathing Technical Committee (HSABPTC). She has also served on national review committees at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and was selected as a member of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Breakthrough Technologies for Commercial Supersonic Aircraft.
Dr. Musielak is the first woman in Latin America to be awarded the degree and title of Aeronautical Engineer from the Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. Dr. Dora Musielak is also the author of several books, two of which she translated into Spanish.
Professor Dr. Dora Musielak is a rocket propulsion scientist engaged in research related to plasma rockets and antimatter propulsion. She has published several books, including Scramjet Propulsion: A Practical Introduction (2022). Wiley Aeronautic and Aerospace Engineering book series.
