By Asia Samachar | United States |
Malaysian scholar Shaspreet Kaur is over the moon with a fellowship from an Atlanta university in hand.
She is one of six students to win the Women of Woodruff (WoW) fellowship aimed to attract, support and retain female students and allies in mechanical and nuclear engineering.
They are from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the oldest and second largest department in the College of Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.
“I’m the eldest in my family and a first-generation graduate. My Nani [maternal grandmother] Manmohan Kaur is a taxi driver, the first lady driver in Kuala Lumpur,” she told Asia Samachar.
WoW is an organisation of Georgia Tech alumnae and friends. The other recipients were Allannah Duffy, Anika Kansky, Jamila Khanfri, Daphne Lin and Autumn Routt.
Shaspreet is a Ph.D. candidate conducting innovative space and solar energy research, advised by Prof Peter Loutzenhiser.
Her work focuses on producing metals and oxygen from lunar regolith using concentrated solar power to support sustainable lunar infrastructure.
She is a co-inventor on a pending patent related to lunar in-situ resource utilisation and has presented her work at major conferences and in leading scientific journals. She is passionate about space exploration and is committed to building a long-term career advancing humanity’s presence beyond Earth.
As a gifted student, she studied at Permata Pintar in Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) for two years. After Form 5, she received Petronas scholarship to study Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University.
Upon graduation, she moved to Atlanta to pursue a PhD in 2020, again with the support of Petronas. She is about to graduate this summer with a 4.0 GPA.
“As a first-generation graduate student, my journey has always been fueled by hard work, resilience and a deep determination to change the course for my family,” she added.
When asked to explain in layman’s term what she is doing, Shaspreet told Asia Samachar: “My thesis is on investigating how to produce oxygen and metals from lunar soil to sustain longer human missions to the Moon. The oxygen can be used for life support and rocket fuel whereas the metals such as aluminum and silicon can be used as construction materials to build habitats and solar panels.
“Being able to use resources on the Moon itself when humans are there helps reduce cost to bring supplies from Earth and the technologies developed will enable humanity to eventually reach Mars.
“The process I’m investigating to produce the oxygen and metals is callled carbothermal reduction. The lunar soil contains many oxides, similar to Earth’s soil. The oxides can be chemically reduced via carbothermal reduction and solar energy to produce oxygen and metals.”
When asked about her family, she said that she comes from a big family residing in Kuala Lumpur.
Shaspreet’s father Ajit Singh Hans runs his own printing machine business while her mum Manjit Kaur works in marketing at a local college. She also grew up with her uncle Amarjit Singh, an avid Sikh coin collector, and his wife Bhrampreet Kaur who works in sales.
“I grew up, in an unconventional way, where these five people acted as my parents,” she said.
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