Photo: Jeannette Tramm P’20

As an engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Serena Tramm ’20 has turned her dream career into a reality.

For millennia, humans have turned their eyes skyward and wondered what lies beyond our planet. Yet only a few actually play a part in finding answers. “My job bridges the question and the data that can answer it,” says Serena Tramm ’20, an applied science systems lead engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif.

Tramm didn’t always dream of exploring space. But an internship as a systems operations engineer with Northrop Grumman and an astrophysics class taught by Professor Michele Thornley, physics & astronomy, got the mechanical engineering major thinking about how she could apply her skills to the great beyond. “I was able to dip my toe into the subject at Bucknell, which helped me realize it was something I wanted to explore more,” she says.

With the help of her professors, she was accepted into a graduate astrophysics program at Rochester Institute of Technology. There, she discovered a love of instrument engineering for astrophysics, which involved launching sounding rockets carrying scientific instruments into space. Her research helped her formulate a clear picture of her ideal career. “I didn’t think it was possible to work for NASA — it’s everyone’s pipe dream,” she says. “But when I got the job offer, I knew it was what I wanted to do.”

At JPL, Tramm has worked on instrument operations for the Mars Perseverance rover and Earth-observing satellites like Sentinel-6, which measure sea-surface heights to understand climate change. “Everyone I work with is doing something that’s never been done before,” she says. “We’re always doing things for the first time.”