Jacob Payne earned his B.S. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of
Technology in 2018 & 2019 under the guidance of Dr. Glenn Lightsey. His focus at Georgia
Tech was on satellite hardware development for CubeSats, and interplanetary navigation
using pulsar timing. Before studying at the University of Iowa, Jacob worked for Blue Canyon
Technologies as a Spacecraft Systems Engineer. He is now a second-year doctoral student in
the DeRoo lab researching instrumentation for high energy astrophysics, optimizing light
collecting optics for millisecond pulsars.