by Tara Haelle

All Professor Cesar Ocampo needs is a dark room and electricity to light up the faces of children from Argentina to East Austin. Sure, as a UT aerospace engineering professor in astrodynamics, he led the development of an award-winning software system currently used at NASA to plan spacecraft missions in the solar system. But, he also does something arguably more challenging: keep thirty kindergartners quietly enraptured with his presentations for nearly an hour.

“With the younger students, you have to work really hard to be entertaining and funny,” Ocampo explains. “I use a lot of pictures and animations of things moving in space, like the moon rotating, a rocket taking off, or a simulation of a solar eclipse. That’s how you keep them fired up.”

That firing up is what makes Ocampo unique: as this year’s recipient of the Raymond F. Dawson Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Engineering, Ocampo not only juggles his teaching, research and travel to conferences, but he also squeezes in visits to elementary, junior high and high schools throughout the Americas every chance he gets. His mission: inspire students of all ages to attend college and pursue aerospace engineering as a career.

“I want to plant the seed of inspiration so they can consider science and engineering positions in the future,” he said. “Our society needs a huge amount of science infusion and science literacy.”

With his Indiana Jones-style hat, a laptop, a projector, a joystick for flying spacecraft simulations, a few science props, and a deck of cards for occasional magic tricks, Ocampo’s one-man show also aims to improve diversity within the engineering field.

Above: Professor Ocampo teaches school children in the Choco province (Columbia) how to fly an airplane simulator.

“At the university level, especially in engineering, there’s a very small number of African-American and Hispanic students,” he said. “A university faculty should be more representative of the society in which it participates. I try to do outreach events targeted toward schools that have large minority populations.”

Some schools he has visited lack resources as basic as electricity: to present at a Colombian school near the rainforest once, he had to rig a power line from the street. He chooses schools based on where he is: whether he’s teaching a study abroad course in Argentina, attending a conference in Peru, or making time in Austin, he finds people to help connect him to a school. He starts with an icebreaker guaranteed to grab their attention, like flying a remote control helicopter in the classroom and landing it on a student’s hand. Then he opens their eyes to the excitement of aerospace engineering.

Sometimes students come to him. Although Ocampo didn’t realize it until recently, his time with aerospace engineering sophomore Alexis Avram, who sought him out as an Westwood High School senior for help with an orbital mechanics report, led her to attend UT. Avram had seriously considered mechanical engineering at Rice until Ocampo invited her to meet him on campus, where he showed her every inch of the aerospace facilities.

“He instantaneously convinced me to come here,” said Avram, recipient of the Uniden Corporation of America Scholarship. “His enthusiasm for the department was so contagious, it got me more excited to be in aerospace and do what I really loved to do.”

Avram even joined Ocampo’s outreach by organizing a fundraiser at Westwood to collect school supplies, calculators and household necessities for a Colombian school. She said most students go into the field only after some prior encounter with aerospace, and Ocampo is the only introduction for a lot of students.

“It honestly has such a big impact because that might be all the exposure they have to aerospace,” she said. “Otherwise these kids wouldn’t be exposed to it at all and wouldn’t be likely to choose aerospace as a career path until someone like him comes along and opens up these possibilities.”