Biography

Andrew Cummings is a postdoctoral research associate interested in instrumentation design and instrument science for space physics research. His research focuses broadly on the areas of small satellite mission design and instrumentation, instrument design and response modeling, systems engineering, and heliophysics. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he developed a method for designing special-purpose satellite constellation missions using multi-objective optimization. He designed an Earth-observing satellite constellation for persistent thermal infrared monitoring as part of MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (PAOC). As a master’s student, he worked on the Regolith X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS), one of the instruments aboard the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission. His master’s thesis isolated the root cause of a data anomaly in the REXIS solar x-ray monitor (SXM), and he led a CAST investigation, which provided suggestions for programmatic improvements to the SXM design process. At Princeton, he focuses on the development of SWAPI for the upcoming IMAP mission and energetic particle analysis using the IS☉IS instrument onboard the Parker Solar Probe.