Gavin Ananda Systems Engineer/Aerospace Engineer, Airborne Detect & Avoid Zipline

Gavin loves designing and understanding about things that are sleek and go swoosh…hence his deep and driven interest in aircraft and wind turbines! Gavin is an Aerospace Engineer and Private Pilot. He is currently working at Zipline as a Systems/Aerospace Engineer and is primarily leading the Airborne Detect and Avoid team at Zipline. In addition to leading the DAA team, Gavin's other primary responsibilities involve aerodynamic/propeller/vehicle modeling and testing for the current generation aircraft (Sparrow) for the purpose of range prediction and route planning. Gavin's Ph.D. work at UIUC involved aerodynamic flight modeling and simulation of aircraft in stall/upset conditions. At UIUC, Gavin also worked on designing wind turbine blades for the ARPA-E funded Segmented Ultralight Morphing (SUMR) project tasked with designing the largest wind turbine in the world (50 MW). His other research work/interests include flight simulation and modeling, airfoil/propeller design, wind tunnel testing (airfoil, propellers, wings, wind turbine blades), and scaled-aircraft flight testing.