After completing her Ph.D., Dr. Townsend served as a research associate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. As part of the MIT FAA/NASA Center of Excellence for Aviation Noise and Emissions Mitigation, she managed a study to develop and finalize a shared vision of national goals for aviation and the environment, and to make recommendations for a sustainable plan of action to achieve those goals.
Her doctoral work was also done at MIT in the Gas Turbine Laboratory where she developed, tested and modeled evaporatively cooled turbine blades for advanced aircraft engines. In addition to her research, she lectured and ran tutorials for undergraduate thermodynamics, heat transfer and fluid mechanics classes. She was also the graduate student liaison for the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department Head Search and a co-founder of the Graduate Association for Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Prior to returning to school for her doctorate, Dr. Townsend spent three years in industry as a performance engineer at Hamilton Sundstrand Power Systems, an aerospace company that manufactures auxiliary power units for commercial and military aircraft. While with Hamilton she was responsible for developing performance models for new products, analyzing data from gas turbine engines and developing control logic specifications.
Dr. Townsend received her M.S. from the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Department at the University of California at Davis . Her thesis involved experimental methods in heat transfer and flow visualization as applied to turbine blade cascades. She earned her B.S. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Mechanical Engineering and credits her mentors at UMass for their early influence in pointing her towards a career in engineering education.
While a doctoral student, she was a recipient of the AIAA Foundation Wilbur and Orville Wright Graduate Research Award, the AIAA Foundation Gordon C. Oates Air Breathing Propulsion Graduate Award and the American Association of University Women Engineering Dissertation Fellowship.
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