At the center of Dr. Rose Weinstein's work at NASA lies a seemingly simple question: what if? "There are so many possibilities for the end of that sentence," she says. "What if we can do it like this? What if we can make it easier? It's really exciting to get creative and envision what those opportunities could look like for making things better." As a Research Aerospace Engineer and Transformation Navigator Lead at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, those questions motivate Rose to reimagine not only what we can achieve at NASA but also how we can best enable those possibilities.
In the Flight Dynamics Branch at Langley, Rose is a trailblazer in exploring the art of the possible. She leads two initiatives under the Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) project at NASA, which "invests in seemingly improbable ideas" geared at finding revolutionary solutions in aviation. The first initiative, Streamlined Workflow for Innovative Flight Test (SWIFT), aims to streamline NASA's current flight-testing approaches to rapidly enable high-value flight research with a flexible risk tolerance. "We have researchers that have some great ideas. They want to get their ideas in the air quickly, cost-effectively, and easily," Rose explains. "There's currently a prohibitive set of processes and technical work involved with starting from scratch and making that a reality, and we're trying to streamline, expedite, and facilitate that." The second CAS initiative explores how distributed electric propulsion can transform traditional approaches to commercial transport aircraft to enhance performance and safety.
In addition to leading these process-transforming initiatives, Rose also recently secured funding for her two Transformative Idea submissions in the fiscal year 2025 Langley Transformation Initiative. One leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to uncover lessons learned and insights from years of flight test records that would be extremely tedious, if not impossible, to parse manually. This allows researchers to better identify and mitigate risks that may be encountered during flight test operations. Her other submission, Signal Analysis and Monitoring (SAM), began as a pet project. The SAM project analyzes wind tunnel data in near real time and uses a set of automated tools to provide relevant insights, as well as detect, diagnose, and document signal anomalies, intending to offload many of these tedious tasks from the researchers. "We're essentially trying to use these tools to make more data-driven decisions and allow researchers to focus their time and effort where it matters most."
Beyond her technical achievements, Rose is deeply engaged in the cultural side of transformation at NASA. "A lot of what we're doing is trying to change people's thought processes: the way that we think about things, and the way that we address challenges. We don't just ignore them and brush them under the rug or have grievances about them. We come together as a group, and we try to resolve them." Although there are many challenges in pursuing change, particularly in defining metrics of success, Rose finds fulfillment in that challenge. She wants to remove the stigma of failure in exploring ambitious, transformative ideas. "I enjoy asking really hard questions and then doing our best to achieve them," she says. "Sometimes it doesn't work out. But the challenge of trying to envision and establish a better reality is really motivating."
Rose's growth-oriented mindset is reflected in her educational background. Growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, she attended a high school that did not emphasize college-preparatory STEM courses, which made her decision to pursue aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland an ambitious one. She discovered a passion for research during her freshman year, leading her to also pursue master's and doctorate degrees at Maryland. This coincided with Rose's introduction to NASA eight years ago through a Pathways internship, allowing her to combine her PhD work with her NASA research and laying a foundation for the transformative role she carries out today.
Looking forward, Rose hopes to continue embedding transformational thinking into the fabric of NASA. "Right now, transformation is a targeted, funded effort," she notes. "We're excited about shifting that to a way of life. It will be the way that we function...where everyone's asking, 'what if' all the time and wondering how we can use new tools to change our way of operating." Although she is well aware of the cultural and bureaucratic difficulties of changing the status quo, Rose has never been one to shy away from a challenge. "Transforming our culture to do just that...to embrace change and uncertainty and calculated risk and boldness...I think that's something that's both exciting and critical to our survival."