AE & EE @ Illinois Tech | 2025 Brooke Owens Fellow
Hi! I’m Han, a graduating senior studying Aerospace Engineering + Electrical Engineering at Illinois Tech. I spend most of my time building things that fly (and occasionally explode in testing - but we learn from that).
At IIT, I lead the Rocketry R&D team, where I’ve designed and launched 7 dual-stage rockets so far. Right now, I’m working toward building the first student-developed dual-stage rocket to break 100 km. You can check out my rockets here!
I also hold FAA Part 107 (Remote Pilot), an FCC HAM Radio License (Technician Class), and TRA Level 1 & 2 certifications.
Fun fact: my childhood dream jobs were astronaut and air traffic controller.
Last summer, I interned at Hermeus as an Avionics Engineering Intern and was part of the Brooke Owens Fellowship. I worked on hardware and environmental testing for avionics systems on Mk 2.1.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked on a lot of different projects, which led me into areas like:
Solid propulsion & high-altitude rocketry
Composite materials & manufacturing
Hardware + embedded systems
Wireless communication & RF systems
UAVs and autonomous systems
My favorites are definitely rocketry, UAVs, and wireless communications, but the list keeps growing. Recently, I’ve been getting into computer vision and image processing. For the past two semesters, I’ve been working on image filtering, classification, and object detection - basically spending a lot of time writing code, tweaking ML models, and figuring out why outputs look wrong before they finally don’t. It might sound random, but it actually comes in handy, especially for projects like the long-range autonomous drone I’m building with onboard object detection. Right now, I’m testing algorithms on a Raspberry Pi before integrating everything onto the drone.
Part-time | Sept 2024 - Present
Illinois Institute of Technology
Internship | May - Aug 2025
Hermeus - Atlanta, GA
Leadership | Sept 2021 - Present
Illinois Tech Rocketry
2025-2026: Pioneer 2, Mini-P 2, Big Red 3 (in progress)
2023-2024: Centennial, Big Red 1, Mini-Red
2022-2023: Talon I
2021-2022: Eris I, White Swan
Project | Jan 2024 - May 2024
2023-2024 AIAA Undergraduate Team Spacecraft Design
Internship | Sept 2023 - Dec 2023
S&C Electric Company - Chicago, IL
Apprenticeship | Sept 2022 - Dec 2022
NASA L'Space - Remote
Apprenticeship | Jun 2022 - Aug 2022
NASA L'Space - Remote
Leadership | Oct 2021 - Oct 2023
Scarlet Spacehawks - NASA Robot Mining Competition
Scarlet Spacehawks is an interdisciplinary team representing Illinois Tech at NASA's annual Robot Mining Competition at the Kennedy Space Center. The team works together to build an autonomous robot capable of traversing the arena, mining an icy regolith simulant, and returning the collected substance to the collection bin.
Research | Jan 2022 - May 2022
Illinois Institute of Technology
Heliostat Device
Check out some of my projects below! While my main focus is rocketry, I enjoy exploring a wide range of multidisciplinary projects, from building drones, designing hardware systems to developing ML models for object detection and image classification.
Vision-X is a long-range autonomous surveillance drone capable of 40 minutes fly time, 10km video transmission with auto avoidance and object detection features using ultrasonic sensors, Raspberry Pi, and PiCam
For my ECE 510 class, I work on various IoT experiments with wireless data acquisition, building client-server communication to encrypt and decrypt data, and more!
Traffic Light Controller Implementation on Arduino UNO
Motion Sensing System using Accelerometer and Raspberry Pi
Wireless Data Acquisition using Temperature Sensor
Human-Machine Interface: Cloud Database and Mobile Device
Obstacle Detection using Ultrasonic Sensor and Zigbee
LoRa and HC-12 Communications
Internet of Things Cybersecurity
In progress
Design and simulation of overvoltage/undervoltage, overcurrent and reverse polarity with LTC 4368 using KiCAD and LTSpice
Improve the performance of Detection Transformer (DETR) by addressing detection accuracy and training efficiency
Train the EfficientNet-B0 model using the CIFAR10-LT dataset, implemented decoupled training with various advanced loss functions for EfficientNet-B0 on the CIFAR10-LT dataset using PyTorch and TensorFlow to address class imbalance and improve image classification accuracy by 11.52%
Reweight
Decoupled training with advanced loss functions: Modified Cross-Entropy, Balanced Softmax, Focal Loss, Class-Balanced Loss, and Class-Balanced Focal Loss.
ITR's first full-scale step-down dual-stage rocket with targeted altitude of 80,000ft and Mach 2.5
ITR's first sub-scale step-down dual-stage rocket with targeted altitude of 15,000ft, aiming to test HEI and ISC
A dual-stage rocket with targeted altitude of 60,000ft
ITR's third dual-stage rocket is designed for the 2024 Argonia Cup Rocket with a targeted altitude of 12,300ft and 80 golf balls payload
ITR's second dual-stage rocket
ITR's first dual-stage rocket
Level 2 Certification
Level 1 Certification