A huge congratulations to WIA-E Brussels leader, Sweety Pate, for winning the prestigious iWoman Global Award 2021 for Science and Innovation!
Sweety Pate is a Satellite Operations Systems Engineer at QinetiQ – Belgium and is involved in satellite missions – ALTIUS. She is the Technical Lead at QinetiQ for the European Space Traffic Management (EUSTM) Horizon 2020 project. Technical Committee member of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA SOSTC).
Over the past ten years, she has been working with the leading aerospace industries and research organizations. She won awards from NASA for eco-friendly aircraft designs successively in 2011 & 2012 and presented the award-winning research at NASA Langley. She also bagged an award from the AIAA in 2012 for space vehicle design. Her prize-winning undergrad studies led to a year-long research position at German Aerospace Center – DLR, where she worked on innovative aircraft & space vehicle designs using collaborative engineering.
She holds a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering (specialization in Space Systems) from the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft). She worked at Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering as an Assembly, Integration & Test (AIT) Engineer & was a launch crew member of STRATOS 2+ rocket that made a European amateur rocketry altitude record in 2015. She worked at Thales Alenia Space in Italy on multidisciplinary optimization of re-entry vehicles – Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) & Space Rider. She has been involved in Poland Mars Analogue Simulation (PMAS) 2017 as an Analog Astronaut and a CapCom. She has experience in model-based systems and concurrent engineering for aerospace applications & has published several papers in this domain.
She has a strong network of collaborations and is the recipient of several awards in her industry for her outstanding research and accomplishments as a young professional. She is leading the Women in Aerospace Europe (WIA-E) organization from Belgium and is a core member of Space Generation and Advisory Council (SGAC) Belgium. She is promoting science among students as the National Coordinator of Scientist of a Day NASA JPL competitions.
