Cyrus Nejat
Virginia Tech College of Engineering
Cyrus Nejat, who earned a master’s degree in 2006 from the Virginia Tech Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, recently won the Yuri Gagarin Achievement Gold Medal Award from the Cosmonautics Federation of Russia. The Gagarin award is named for the Russian pilot and cosmonaut who gained worldwide fame in 1961 as the first human to journey into outer space. He was killed in a flight training accident in 1968.
The Federation honored Nejat for his aerospace research, which includes the recent papers “Space Instrument Optimization by Implementing of Generic Three Bodies Circular Restricted Problem” and “Three Dimensional Orbit By Implementation Of Spacecraft Stability Analysis Making A Halo Orbit About CN Lines,” written while at the University of Southern California, where he is a master’s student in the Viterbi School of Engineering.
Born in the United States, Nejat placed first twice in highly competitive Iranian university examinations. In 2010, Nejat won the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Gold Medal from the American Astronomical Society. It is the highest honor awarded to students.