Haley Cummings, '16, M.S. '18, Innovates Tools For Mars Exploration At NASA
By Tony Scott
Haley Cummings ’16, M.S. ’18, is working at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.
(Photo credit: NASA)
Haley Cummings, ’16, M.S. ’18, is working on innovative tools that will impact Mars exploration at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, but her journey began as a hardworking student-athlete at NIU.
She was most recently the principal investigator for NASA’s Rotor Optimization for the Advancement of Mars eXploration (ROAMX) Project.
According to NASA, the ROAMX Project “will significantly enhance rotorcraft capabilities on Mars, thereby enabling a vast expansion of science experiments and exploration of the surface and atmosphere of Mars."
"It is a huge reward to see the work that my team and I have been working on get used for next-generation helicopters on Mars,” Cummings said. “Some of the research that we did was groundbreaking and led to new discoveries of how fluid behaves at Mars flight conditions. It is incredibly rewarding to see the work I’m doing making an impact on the science and exploration capabilities that we have for Mars.”
After her freshman year, Cummings applied for a number of internships. She earned an internship at NASA Ames in the Rotorcraft Aeromechanics Branch.
“That internship changed my life,” she said. “I fell in love with the San Francisco Bay Area. The mentality of people matched my mentality, and everyone was a nerd, like me. My coworkers were incredible, and the work I was doing was so exciting. Putting the mechanical engineering knowledge I was learning in my classes into practice at my internship was beyond cool – and really helped the concepts sink in.”
She earned an additional NASA internship in the spring of her senior year and was able to work on Mars helicopter research.
“While I was working on my master’s, I applied for a NASA Pathways Internship, which is basically a co-op program, and I was hired,” she said. “When I finished my master’s, I started full-time at NASA Ames and have been there since.”
She discussed some of the projects she has worked on during her time at Ames.
“My first project that I started during my second internship was the mechanical design of a test stand to test blades for Mars helicopters,” she said. “My second project was designing the Side-by-Side Test Stand. I was deputy test director for that wind tunnel test, which was looking at the performance of intersecting rotors at various degrees of rotor separation.”
Cummings and her team submitted a proposal to NASA’s Early Career Initiative (ECI) Program, which is open to NASA early-career civil servants.
“We were awarded an ECI in 2021 to pursue the computational optimization and experimental validation of next-generation rotors optimized for performance on Mars,” she said.
In February 2025, the team finished the experimental portion of the project, which is the ROAMX project.
“I learned so much from being the principal investigator for that project,” she said. “We have published a couple of papers and have several more lined up to publish. The rotor that we designed and the design framework that we developed in the project have been used for the next-generation Chopper helicopter that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on. All signs point to our rotor being used on the next helicopter that gets sent to Mars!”
Cummings grew up in Texas, with a few years of her childhood spent in Indiana. Her dad worked for Continental and United Airlines on the business side, and her mom is a CPA who was an accountant.
“My dad worked for Continental while the Continental/United merger was happening, and he ended up getting transferred to Chicago from Houston during my junior year of high school,” she said. “My mom and siblings and I stayed in Houston for my last year and a half of high school so I could finish school in Houston. My dad, thanks to flight benefits, would basically commute to Houston on the weekends. We lived with my grandma in Dickinson, Texas during that time.”
Cummings and her two younger siblings were homeschooled by their mom through high school.
“We also took classes in different homeschool groups, and all of us took dual-credit classes through community colleges during high school,” she said.
She earned both of her degrees in mechanical engineering and was able to graduate from NIU in two and a half years because she finished her general education classes at community college.
For someone who now works for NASA and received dual degrees in mechanical engineering, Cummings said math was not easy for her as a child. But she quickly caught up during high school.
“When I was taking math at home using Saxon Math, I was pretty terrible at it and did not enjoy it at all,” she said. “When I started taking math at the local junior college in Texas during my sophomore year of high school, everything clicked. I had some great teachers, started with college algebra and got all the way through differential equations and calculus 3 by the time I graduated. I loved it because it was so logical, and I knew I wanted to do something with math. I also took physics at the junior college and started to think that maybe I wanted to go into engineering.”
Cummings also played on the NIU Women’s Soccer team. It was a sport she loved from a young age.
“While I was growing up, I always played soccer,” she said. “I played competitively for a couple different teams in the Houston area during junior high and high school.”
She knew she wanted to play Division I college soccer, and at the time, the recruitment process started during her sophomore year of high school. Her dad working in the Chicago area made her consider college in Illinois, along with Texas.
“I was looking at schools in Texas, but when my dad got transferred to Illinois, I started looking in Illinois too,” she said. “I found NIU because of the engineering program, the soccer team, and the proximity to Chicago. I started a correspondence with the NIU coaches and my coach from NIU, John Ross, flew down to Houston to watch a practice at my club team, Albion. Next thing I knew, I was visiting NIU and meeting the team and coaches. Everything happened really quickly.”
Cummings earned an academic and an athletic scholarship to help her with finances during her time at NIU. She also found that as a soccer player, she had a built-in support system as soon as she arrived on campus.
“Everyone kind of becomes instant family,” she said of her teammates.
She recalls the impact of training at the Yordon Center.
“My freshman winter was the first time the team was able to practice inside the Yordon Center in the winter, and it made a huge difference for us to be able to practice there right next to the weightlifting gym and the training room and recovery equipment,” she said. “Yordon was probably among my favorite places to be on campus, especially with all the resources for studying and the areas to sit and do homework, and then the ability to go kick a ball around in between to take breaks.”
She lists a number of important figures in her life while at NIU.
“College felt like a big transition to me, and I was lucky to have my coach, Christie Chappell, as someone to look up to and take advice from,” Cummings said. “She was willing to help me train outside of normal practice times and was very inspirational to me. She was always building me up and encouraging me to be the best version of myself that I could be.”
Another impactful mentor was Professor Brianno Coller.
“Professor Coller has won several awards for his outstanding teaching ability, and I definitely benefited from that,” Cummings said. “Every class I took from Professor Coller was my favorite class. He made learning engineering fun, and the concepts also stuck with me, and neither of those things are a given in engineering.”
Associate Professor Sahar Vahabzadeh was another mentor for Cummings.
“I worked on my master’s thesis under her,” Cummings said. “She constantly inspired me with her dedication to excellence and her commitment to help me learn. I wrote my first journal paper under her supervision, and I learned what it means to write a solid journal paper. I’m very thankful for her mentorship.”
Cummings said the skills she learned from Coller and Vahabzadeh’s courses were game changers.
“I take those skills with me and have built upon them in my career. I’m thankful I got to get hands-on experience in my master’s thesis work,” she said.
Cummings also praised the lessons learned during her time on the soccer team.
“I learned that sometimes being a leader does not look like you think it would or should,” she said. “I got the opportunity to be a leader from the bench instead of from the field. I also learned about personal responsibility and time management. And how to be a good teammate.”
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