About
Benjamin Margolis is an aerospace engineer in the Systems Analysis Office at NASA's Ames Research Center. Ben earned his B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College in 2010, his M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Santa Clara University in 2016, and his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of California at Davis in 2020. Prior to beginning his M.S., Ben worked as an industrial automation controls engineer, as a chief engineer for a medical device startup, and as a sole proprietor building websites. Ben started his graduate school career with an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and finished as a NASA Pathways student supporting control system design for a deployable entry vehicle assessment project.
Since completing his dissertation in 2020, Ben supported a number of vehicle analysis and design projects and has made substantial theoretical and practical contributions to the field. In 2021, Dr Margolis began developing a novel method to incorporate trajectories into numerical optimization solvers which was published in The Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications in October 2023. Earlier in 2023, Ben began writing an engineering modeling framework called “condor” for the rapid development of analysis and design capabilities. Condor was first used internally to develop assessments of green technology impacts on airliner performance. The combination of Ben's trajectory optimization methods and a colleague's robust performance analysis method, implemented in condor, has been used to identify navigation system requirements and robust-optimal trajectories designs for orbital rendezvous scenarios, satisfying safety, operational, and budgetary constraints under uncertainty. Ben is a leading software designer for a general-purpose tool for robust trajectory analysis using condor, in part of a collaboration between multiple NASA centers and programs.
Ben’s research interests include optimization, control systems, and scientific computing which provides a broad toolbox to solve problems from a variety of application areas. He is a named inventor on 18 patents covering two different medical devices and a flight vehicle control architecture. Ben has written 12 peer-reviewed publications and 16 conference papers across a variety of disciplines from theoretical contributions in linear algebra and optimal control theory to practical applications in manufacturing, software development, and aerospace vehicle and mission design. He was a lead developer on 5 open-source and 4 internally-used software projects for design/analysis capability across the NASA portfolio including flight mechanics, propulsion, aircraft, and spacecraft. Benjamin Margolis received 6 NASA Center awards since joining Ames and 9 student awards over the course of his academic career.