Shahid Tasbih

I'm an aerospace engineering student in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Course 16), driven by a fascination with what lies beyond our atmosphere. My work sits at the intersection of autonomous systems, machine learning, and spacecraft design.

I've always been the kind of person who dives headfirst into challenges just to see what happens. In high school, I built a giant ninja star out of 256 sheets of paper for my Geometry class — starting from 1, then 4, 16, 64, 256 — only stopping because my teacher ran out of unused packets. I taught myself AP Calc AB and BC in two weeks just because Precalc wasn't challenging enough. I finished every AP World History chapter over Thanksgiving break on a whim. The worst that can happen is I fail, and learn something new in the process.

That same mindset drives my work today. I'm passionate about building autonomous machines that can perceive and navigate complex environments — from lunar landers that teach themselves to touch down safely, to satellites that detect their own anomalies. Beyond autonomy, I'm deeply interested in the propulsion systems that will take us further: designing future spacecraft capable of covering vast interstellar distances in short times, potentially through nuclear propulsion technologies.

Right now, I'm a research assistant in MIT's AeroAstro department, working on flight software for satellite systems and optimizing orbital event detection with neural networks on embedded hardware. When I'm not in the lab, I'm usually training reinforcement learning agents to land on the Moon or engineering AR/VR systems for next-gen helmets.