Rodrigo
Diaz Salazar.

I'm a mechanical engineering student at Northwestern University on the B.S./M.S. pathway, specializing in Aerospace. I expect to complete my bachelor's degree in March 2027 and my master's degree in June 2027. I love building things that fly, and I especially enjoy using FEA, CFD, and first-principles structural analysis to understand how flight hardware will behave before it is manufactured, tested, and launched. Most of the projects on this site follow that full arc: a real engineering question, quantitative analysis, a design decision, and a physical or computational result that can be evaluated honestly.

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. At Northwestern, NUStars gave me the opportunity to help build and launch full competition rockets for NASA Student Launch and IREC. I manufactured fiberglass flight structures, validated designs with FEA and CFD, and developed an onboard camera system that captured the team's first visual confirmation of active drag-system actuation. 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. At Northwestern's FAST-AM Lab, I then completed independent research 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, data rigor, manufacturing intuition, flight-hardware experience, design-for-manufacturing discipline, and research-level scientific care. I try to bring all of it to every project, whether it's a class assignment, a competition rocket, or something built for a real client with a tight budget.

I enjoy playing tennis and soccer, following the NFL and NBA, and keeping up with fantasy football. I also like the strategy of poker and the chance to spend time with friends around a game.

Traveling and hiking are how I explore new places. I also have a 136-day Duolingo streak.

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.