Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, department grad Kathleen Howell honored by AerE
Author: John Burnett-Larkins
Kathleen Howell (B.S. AerE ’73), a 2020 Iowa State University Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, recently visited campus and the Department Aerospace Engineering, where she was honored in a reception. Due to the pandemic, the original award ceremony for Howell was postponed to the fall of 2021.
The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor for Iowa State University graduates. It honors alumni who are nationally and/or internationally recognized for preeminent contributions to their professions or life’s work.
Howell was accompanied by her husband Edward, who is a 1973 Iowa State University aerospace engineering/industrial engineering graduate. Her Distinguished Alumni Award nominator, Rudy Herrmann, an Iowa State industrial engineering alum, was also on hand, and spoke at the reception.
Howell, the Hsu Lo Distinguished Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, was recognized for her pioneering advancements in celestial mechanics and astrodynamics, mentoring a generation of highly regarded researchers and providing distinguished leadership and service.
She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Astronautical Society. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Astronautics and serves as an advocate for the advancement of women in engineering. She was one of only two females in her aerospace engineering graduating class at Iowa State in 1973.
Howell serves on a variety of advisory councils across the country, including NASA, and served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Astronautical Sciences, which is considered the most prestigious journal in astrodynamics, since 1992, until stepping down in 2019. She was also recently appointed to the Advisory Board for Slingshot Aerospace, a firm that applies advanced analytics, machine learning, computer vision, and collaborative tools to data from Earth and space.
In addition to her bachelor’s degree from Iowa State, Howell earned master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. She joined Purdue as a faculty member in 1982.