Tony Nguyen
B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Rice University, Class of 2028
Hi, and thanks for checking out my website. I enjoy building rockets, drones, and some of the mechanisms within them. I love aerospace and hands-on engineering, and I hope this site gives you a better look at the projects I’ve worked on, the skills I’ve developed, and a little more about who I am.
Experience
- Top Grain Technologies, Mechanical Engineering Intern, May to Aug 2026. Reverse-engineered a legacy turbofan turbine blisk with partially missing manufacturing documentation, moving 33% of its cast-and-weld production to an additive process, and authored the DARPA-standard drawing package around laser powder bed fusion.
- Rice Eclipse Rocketry, Avionics-Mechanical Lead, Jan 2025 to present. Leading the airframe, avionics bay, and recovery system for a reusable 8 g sensor-testing rocket, with a MATLAB recovery model and ANSYS structural sizing. Rocketry · Active fin stabilization
- Preston Innovation Laboratory, Undergraduate UAV Researcher, May 2025 to present. Built a humanitarian UAV from concept to flight-ready vehicle around a custom edible composite I formulated and characterized, 41% more payload than an off-the-shelf equivalent. Delivery drone
Projects
Hover a project to see it. Click to read the full write-up.
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Active fin stabilization canard system
Rice Eclipse Rocketry. Servo-driven canards that correct pitch and roll in flight. Four independently actuated canards in a 3 in airframe, designed in Onshape for a Mach 0.75 flight.
- Onshape
- Mechanism design
- MATLAB
- Control law derivation
- Aerodynamic load analysis
- Structural hand calcs
- OpenRocket
- 3D printing
Active fin stabilization canard system →
-
Humanitarian delivery drone with a custom composite airframe
My research in the Preston Innovation Lab at Rice. Formulated a custom edible composite material, designed the airframe for additive manufacturing, and successfully flew a drone made of pasta. It maneuvered extremely well, pulling off high-torque flips and tricks in the air, and carried 41% more payload than an off-the-shelf equivalent. While it was a low-fidelity project, it is where I built most of my technical foundation in CAD, FEA, material testing, and R&D.
- SolidWorks
- FEA
- Material formulation
- Rheometry
- Tensile testing
- Python
- Design for additive manufacturing
- Systems integration
Humanitarian delivery drone →
-
High-power rocketry: L1 certification and the 2026-27 avionics test rocket
Designed, built, and flew my L1 cert rocket. Now leading the subteam building a reusable 8 g sensor-testing rocket for a three-flight campaign.
- OpenRocket
- SolidWorks
- Onshape
- MATLAB recovery modeling
- Recovery system design
- Requirements flowdown
- Fabrication
- Team leadership
High-power rocketry →
Leadership and Ethics
Beyond the technical projects, I have a deep passion for leadership and ethics. I am the Avionics-Mechanical Lead on the Rice Eclipse Rocketry team, a Student Director at the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, Founder and President of the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers at Rice, and External Vice President and Co-founder of the Rice SolidWorks User Group. More on all of that on the leadership page.
The biggest ethical question of our time is AI and whether the systems we build stay aligned with the people they serve. Alignment is not only a software problem. Lockheed Martin's own AI principles call for systems that are reliable and governable, and in aerospace an algorithm's decision only becomes real through hardware. The mechanism, the failsafe, and the physical limits on what a system can do are where an engineer like me has a say. My canard system is a small version of exactly that. The flight computer picks the angle, and my hardware decides whether that command turns into safe motion. How I think about this, and what I learned competing in the Lockheed Martin Ethics in Engineering Case Competition, is on the ethics page.
Right now
Looking for a summer 2027 mechanical engineering internship in aerospace or defense.
Skills
| CAD | SolidWorks, Onshape, Creo, Siemens NX |
|---|---|
| Analysis | ANSYS Mechanical (static structural, modal), ANSYS Fluent, FEA, MATLAB, OpenRocket, RocketPy |
| Design | GD&T, engineering drawing packages (DARPA standard, used professionally), DFM, design for additive manufacturing, laser powder bed fusion |
| Materials and testing | Composite formulation, rheometry, tensile testing, material characterization |
| Fabrication | 3D printing (FDM and food extrusion), laser cutting, lathe, mill, CNC, welding, soldering, drill press, band saw |
| Code | Python (data pipelines, NumPy, Matplotlib), MATLAB, Simulink |
| Rocketry | Level 1 high-power certified, OpenRocket vehicle design, recovery sizing, high-g structural sizing |
| Honors | 2026 Lockheed Martin Ethics in Engineering Case Competition, quarterfinalist (top 8 of 72 universities) |