Rodrigo
Diaz Salazar.

I'm a mechanical engineering student at Northwestern University on the B.S./M.S. pathway, concentrating in aerospace, expecting to finish my undergraduate degree in June 2027. What I care about most is the full arc of an engineering problem - from a load calculation or a CFD setup, through the design decisions that calculation actually drives, to a part that gets built, tested, and either works or teaches you something when it doesn't. Most of the projects on this site follow that same arc: real numbers, a real design, and a real result at the end, whether that's a rocket that launched, a rim that got struck with a hammer, or a wing that got put through a wind tunnel of equations.

My path here wasn't a straight line into aerospace. I started with two internships in financial planning and digital transformation at City National Bank of Florida, where I learned to work with data I didn't fully understand yet and turn it into something a decision maker could act on. From there I moved into manufacturing at a Saint-Gobain fiberglass plant, troubleshooting automated production equipment and learning that the people running a machine every day often know more about it than the drawings do. Then came product design at Tackform, building parametric CAD for vehicle-mounted hardware that had to survive real vibration and get manufactured by someone else. Now I'm doing independent research at Northwestern's FAST-AM Lab on vibration-assisted additive manufacturing - combining mechanical design, CFD, and scientific software in one project.

Each step added a layer rather than replacing the last one: business judgment, then data rigor, then manufacturing intuition, then design-for-manufacturing discipline, then research-level scientific care. I try to bring all of it to every project, whether it's a class assignment, a rocketry build, or something built for a real client with a tight budget.

I'm drawn to aerospace specifically because it doesn't let any single part of the process slide - the analysis has to be right, the hardware has to actually survive the environment it's built for, and the margin between "it worked" and "it didn't" is usually much thinner than in other fields. That's the same reason I chase projects that force me to validate my own work: cross-checking FEA against two independent analytical methods, comparing a CFD result against real acoustic test data, or reinserting an optimizer's output back into a standalone simulation just to make sure it actually did what I think it did. I'd rather find out my model is wrong myself than have a reviewer, a test stand, or a launch find out for me.

I'm a member of NUStars, Northwestern's rocketry team, where I've worked on airframe composites and onboard avionics for competition flights. I also serve as Academic Affairs Coordinator for Delta Tau Delta. Outside of team projects, I build and fly my own high-power rockets, and I like taking on independent design projects that don't come with a syllabus - a brake caliper that actually has to stop a bicycle, a roller built for an actual dance studio on an actual budget, a rim I hit with a hammer to figure out how stiff it really is. If it ends in real hardware, I'm interested.

If any of the work on this site is relevant to what you're doing, or you just want to talk through how something works, reach out - my contact info is in the footer below, and my résumé and full project write-ups are linked throughout the site.