About

Dr. Collin Whittaker

Dr. Collin Whittaker is an assistant research scientist at the Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Collin received his BS in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Spring of 2019, where he worked with the High-Power Electric Propulsion Laboratory. He then joined PEPL as a PhD student in Aerospace Engineering that fall. He completed his PhD in the Spring of 2025 with his dissertation “Designing Porous Electrospray Array Thrusters Under Uncertainty”, where he quantified electrospray emitter manufacturing tolerances and other sources of uncertainty to then propagate through design optimization and identify robust system architectures. He hired into the lab as an Assistant Research Scientist in May of 2025.