Russell is a masters student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He has a B.S. in Physics from UC Davis, where he published two papers concerning the evolution of metallicity gradients in simulated galaxies from the FIRE project. In HRVIP he is the lead roboticist for the REPAS (Robotics Enabled Precision Agriculture in Space) project, using ROS2 for robot arm manipulation. The subject of Russell’s thesis is the creation of a novel vacuum gripper to enable the robotic capability to perform multispectral analysis to assess plant health. His project lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and botany, in pursuit of a permanent agricultural presence on lunar and Martian habitats.
Russell’s interests include the study of galaxies, space colonization, bioastronautics, astrodynamics, and robotics.