Rayna Carter
MIT Department: Aeronautics and Astronautics
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Wesley Harris
Research Supervisor: Stewart Issacs
Undergraduate Institution: Howard University
Hometown: Berkeley, California
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Rayna Carter is from Berkeley, California. She grew up doing Black Girls Code, and her interest in STEM blossomed into a passion for mechanical engineering. Rayna is a rising senior, mechanical engineering major, and mathematics minor currently studying at Howard University. In 2019 she worked as a Process Intern characterizing positive photoresist image inversion processes at UC Berkeley’s Nanofabrication Laboratory. Over the past two summers, she interned at Apple in the Exploratory Design and the iPhone Team. At Howard, Carter is an undergraduate researcher in the Surface Engineering and Nanofluids Laboratory, where she analyzes the thermophysical properties of various nanofluids. She is currently interning with the AeroAstro department at the Hypersonics Laboratory. She works to mitigate dust deposition on solar panels via novel panel geometries. In the future, her goal is to attend graduate school and conduct research at the intersection of autonomous systems, mechatronics, and sustainability.
