During “Mole Day,” a day celebrating chemistry in high school, Erik Axhahl proudly sang, “They Call Me a Chemistry Nerd.”  Being a so-called chemistry nerd didn’t keep Erik from getting a nomination for homecoming king while at Duluth East High School.  Erik was a well-rounded student--a leader in his school band and in the theatre department. 

As an undergraduate attending the University of Minnesota, Erik saw his passions begin to develop into an career field. He had the opportunity to work with one of his professors on a project for the US military. Their work focused on the use of cavitation, the tiny bubbles produced when things, such as a propeller, move through the water. By creating supercavitation they were able to encapsulate an underwater torpedo in a large bubble of air. This allowed the torpedo to move through the water ten times faster than it would have without this technology.

Erik admits that he had some moral issues to consider when working on weapons that could be used in war. But, he says that the work of an engineer is never solely for government or private applications and that technology always flows into the public sector.  

There was a time when Erik was only as close to space as Star Trek could take him. As Georgia Tech graduate student, he worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia to develop a system that will someday develop and put a piece of equipment the size of a two-story building on Mars.

How will Erik’s graduate work possibly impact daily lives? When asked, Erik offered a long list of things developed by NASA that now are common parts of our lives.  When it was discovered that the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror was faulty, there were many Americans skeptical about their tax-dollars being spent to correct it. The algorithmic solution to Hubble’s problem, had more practical applications than just fixing the space telescope, Erik explains. For example, it gave us new technology to be used in monitoring breast cancer. For the Global Positioning System (GPS) system in your car and on your cell phone, you can thank NASA as well.

What excites Erik about his dynamic and expanding career choice in science is the possibility that a project he might work on in the future will someday go into space. 

Erik says science isn’t always a high national priority but “if the space program weren’t there, people would notice.” What excites Erik about his dynamic and expanding career choice in science is the possibility that a project he might work on in the future will someday go into space. 

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, he spent his second summer interning for NASA. He worked as the computer programmer in a group of students trying to send a device the size of a Mini Cooper to Mars by 2016. In his coming years, as a student of Georgia Tech studying again at Langley, Axdahl will try to put more than just machines on Mars.

It’s been a long road getting from Star Trek to NASA. Science, for Erik, is a way of questioning and a way of understanding. Through his years of study he found science helped him comprehend the workings of the universe. Erik strongly feels that the sciences “draw back a curtain on the wonder, complexity, and elegance of creation.”