Nikita Kozak

Nikita Kozak, from Waukee, Iowa, is pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford School of Engineering. He graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Nikita aspires to revolutionize vehicles to enable urban air transportation by coupling machine learning and computational engineering. Nikita has conducted research with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and both the Iowa State University Computational Fluid-Structure Interaction Laboratory and the Ivy College of Business. He earned first-place honors at five national research symposiums and has two first-author publications. Nikita is a Goldwater Scholar, a DoE Computational Science Fellow, and a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Additionally, he excelled on Iowa State’s hockey team, gaining national recognition as a top ten goalie, and all-conference honors. Nikita also served as an undergraduate research ambassador, as founder and president of a local research outreach program, and as a youth hockey coach.