Danylo Malyuta: "Study hard, have faith in yourself, and trust me that success will come."

As a kid, what did you want to be?

Ever since I was about seven years old, I had wanted to become an aircraft designer. This is the type of engineer who knows a little bit of everything about all the parts of an airplane, and who uses that knowledge to draw out a rough sketch of a brand new design. It is both an engineering and a highly creative task. The dream was inspired in me, I think, by my grandfathers. They told me stories of their service in the Soviet army as an airplane mechanic and a rocket telemetry expert. Furthermore, my uncle encouraged me to build model airplanes when I was young.

The dream of being an aircraft designer stayed with me until I was about 20 years old. By then, I was studying Mechanical Engineering at EPFL. I had done an internship at ETH with Max Kriegleder, then Raffaello D'Andrea's PhD student, designing and testing a new version of the Distributed Flight Array drone at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (IDSC). I became attracted by control engineering, which seemed to be populated by young and hip people who believe in being able to change the world with their computer algorithms. At the same time, SpaceX was growing in fame with their daring mission to land and reuse space rockets. I followed what my heart was telling me and decided to re-imagine myself not as an aircraft designer, but as a space flight control engineer. I still love airplanes, but the dream of landing one of us Earthlings on Mars has been what I’ve been working on ever since that internship with Max at ETH.

You did your bachelor’s degree at EPFL and then moved to Zurich to do your master in Robotics Systems and Control. Why did you move to Zurich?

That's a good question. EPFL is a great school, and I feel like I am served every day by the skills that I learned there in math, physics, etc. I moved to ETH for three reasons. First, my internship at IDSC showed me that there were many more researchers and laboratories working in robotics and control at ETH than there seemed to be at EPFL at the time. Thus, it made sense to move to a place with a higher density of the type of research that I was interested in. Second, I was very attracted by the ETH ecosystem of Focus Projects which D-MAVT students can carry out in their Bachelor's third year. I was particularly excited about the AMZ Formula Student Racing team: It designs and builds an entire racing car in a single academic year, and competes internationally during the summer. I ended up joining AMZ for my Master's semester project, and had the experience of a lifetime developing and testing an energy regulating control algorithm on a real car. Third, I went to ETH to simply challenge myself by changing my environment. My family migrated between many countries when I was growing up. In my experience, this has only brought positive and unexpected changes to my life. Going to ETH, I trusted that the change would reveal new and unexpected positives. From new friends to new knowledge and opportunities, I am glad to say that ETH brought exactly that.

In 2018, you won the Willi Studer prize for the best graduate. What does that mean to you?

I was very humbled to receive that honor from ETH. Especially when I consider the amazing and diverse pool of creative, smart and dedicated young people formed by my graduating peers of the 2018 Robotics, Systems and Control cohort. First of all, I do not think that in absolute terms of making a positive impact on the world, that I deserve the award more than any of my peers. However, to lend meaning to the prize, I think that it serves as another confirmation of a life motto, which I live by and try to communicate to others: You can achieve anything by working really, really hard. As Will Smith says, "no matter how talented you are, your talent is going to fail you if you're not skilled, if you don't study, if you don’t work really hard and dedicate yourself to being better every single day". My peers have known me as the quiet person, always sitting in the front row of the lecture room, and as the last person in the Master’s student study room on the third floor of D-MAVT. I will say it plainly: I was not born smart. Through primary and middle school, I was an average-to-worse student. Until the day when a public school teacher in Boston, MA, showed her belief in me by starting to consult me about new airplanes reported in the news. It made me feel valued, and a fire was lit for me to become an aerospace engineer. I knew that math and science were important for engineering, and so I spared no effort to excel in those subjects. The Willi Studer prize, for me, is a result of relentless work since the age of 12, and not the result of some unattainable talent, which I was lucky to be born with. I relish in that I am not talented, because it allows me to communicate to every young person the power of their dedication and hard work. Study hard, have faith in yourself, and trust me that success will come.

Currently, you do a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington. What do you work on?

I'm incredibly fortunate to be advised by Professor Behçet Açıkmeşe, who is actually one of the founders of the control algorithm which today lands SpaceX rockets. I met Prof. Açıkmeşe when he was at the University of Texas at Austin during a summer internship. We came in touch through a common connection, EPFL Prof. Colin Jones, who helped out during my Bachelor's project to build an autonomous model rocket.

After ETH, I joined Prof. Açıkmeşe at the University of Washington's Autonomous Controls Laboratory. My research is about finding new ways to use optimization tools to better control spaceflight systems such as planetary rocket landers and satellites. Space systems perform at peak capacity in order to save cost and survive in the harsh space environment. Optimization allows us to improve and expand the safety and performance of these systems by an ingenious exploitation of physics through computer algorithms. I also work with custom quadrotor drones in our lab, which allow testing these spaceflight algorithms, since quadrotors and rockets actually have a lot in common in terms of their dynamical behavior.

You were a visiting researcher at NASA. What is it like to work for NASA?

I had the huge honor of spending nine months at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena in 2017, and two months at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2019. NASA is a fantastic organization filled with smart scientists and engineers who carry decades of invaluable experience and who truly care about their mission to discover new science for the benefit of life on Earth.

I’ll briefly mention four great things about working at NASA. First, it’s the experience of the people. More than 60 years of experience as an organization have filled NASA with a great knowledge bank to know which engineering ideas work and are worth pursuing, and which aren’t. I think that getting exposure to experienced engineers is a great asset for a young professional. You can more quickly focus on ideas that are worth pursuing because they are truly novel and relevant. Second, NASA feels like a big family. People of all ranks are eager to share their experience, and are in the mission for the long haul. There are few companies in the USA where you will find as high a density of senior staff with multi-decade experience as you will at NASA. This gets me to the third aspect – meeting historical, large-than-life people. At JPL, I had the opportunity to meet people like Miguel San Martín, who is the chief Mars landing engineer since the Sojourner rover. There are furthermore countless engineers and scientists working behind the scenes of projects that we as the public hear about: missions to the International Space Station, to the moon, to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. The last aspect that I’ll mention is that by working at NASA, you get to realize how much NASA is involved behind the scenes of many public and private projects, for which it gets too little credit. For example, NASA has been a huge supporter and systems validator for the recent SpaceX human spaceflight to the ISS.

Overall, for me, NASA is an organization that brings smart and creative people of all backgrounds together for a mission to benefit the world in an atmosphere of friendship and collaboration.