The United States Embassy in Nigeria has celebrated Nigerian-American aerospace engineer Wendy Okolo for her work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
In a post on its official X platform, the embassy highlighted Okolo’s contributions at the NASA Ames Research Center, where she leads research on flight safety, aircraft monitoring systems, and control optimisation.
“Nigerian American Dr. Wendy A. Okolo (@wendy_okolo) is breaking barriers in aerospace! At 26, she earned her Ph.D., and now at @NASA Ames Research Center, she leads research on flight safety and controls optimization,” the embassy wrote.
Okolo, born in 1989 and raised in Nigeria, attended Saint Mary’s Primary School and Queen’s College in Lagos.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in 2010 and became the first Black woman to obtain a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from UTA in 2015 at the age of 26.
She started her career as an undergraduate intern at Lockheed Martin, working on NASA’s Orion spacecraft and later worked in the Control Design and Analysis Branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
At NASA Ames, she serves as a sub-project manager in the Intelligent Systems Division and a research engineer in the Discovery and Systems Health Technology (DaSH) program.
Okolo has received several awards, including the Amelia Earhart Fellowship, the DoD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, the AIAA John Leland Atwood Graduate Award and the NASA Ames Early Career Researcher Award.
She also received the NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal in 2021 and was named among the Most Influential People of African Descent the same year.
In June 2023, Wendy Okolo published her book Learn to Fly: On Becoming a Rocket Scientist.
The embassy noted that Nigerians are among the most highly educated immigrant groups in the United States, contributing significantly to science, technology, medicine and business.
