Andre Arguelles, Engr ’21 (MS), started his career as a radio frequency engineer at Lockheed Martin. Although Lockheed offers its employees the opportunity to earn a master’s degree in systems engineering through Cornell University, Andre got a waiver to get his master’s in electrical and computer engineering from Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals instead.
“I considered the Cornell program, but I didn’t want to be a general systems engineer,” he says. “I knew I wanted to dive deeply into electrical engineering and specialize in satellite communications systems … I wanted to work in space.”
He looked to Johns Hopkins to explore a more technical study of the space industry where he wanted to transition his career to. “I knew that Hopkins was behind New Horizons, the deepest piece of space technology orbiting Pluto and sending back information to this day, and it’s been 20 years since that mission started,” he says.
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA’s New Frontiers program. It was launched in 2006, becoming the first spacecraft to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015. It was engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
For his coursework, he specifically sought out Christopher DeBoy, a chief communications engineer for the New Horizons mission. “I wanted to learn from the experts that teach space communications,” he says. “He was a professor of mine, and I don’t think he knows how important he was to me, but the two courses I took with him were very impressionable.” DeBoy currently teaches Satellite Communications Systems (525.640).
“When I walk into a room now, I don’t just see the room,” he says. “I see the systems in place that allow us to have WiFi and where the WiFi might go out or how computers might communicate with one another. It’s kind of like magic, but magic is when you don’t understand how the trick works, and science is understanding it and putting math behind it.”
When asked about how space systems communication applied to the Artemis II mission, for which EP alum Reid Wiseman served as mission commander, he said, “Understanding how we have an Earth-based terminal able to communicate with something that’s moving at 10,000 kilometers per second or something that is hundreds of thousands of miles into the galaxy—those are all the same systems. Solving the problem changes, but the physics stay the same.”
While in the electrical and computer engineering program, he realized he could expand his studies by also completing a graduate certificate in technical management. “The combination of those two really supported the next step of my career,” he says. “Right after graduating, I became the technical assistant and chief of staff to the vice president of the Advanced Technology Center of Lockheed Martin Space, and I probably would have never been prepared for that role if it wasn’t for the Engineering for Professionals program.”
Andre is currently pursuing a PhD in electrical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, where his research focuses on communications systems, remote sensing, and resource-collection technologies. He also started a new role at BAE Systems Inc. as a principal space and mission systems engineer where he is developing space systems, radars, and communication technologies.
“EP has been very important to my career and has basically been a catalyst for everything that I’ve been doing for the last five years,” he says. “Without the program, I probably would be in a very different position than I am in today.”