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WVU Navigation Lab
Jason Gross, Professor and Chair

Dr. Cagri Kilic

Post-Doctoral Fellow
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Dr. Cagri Kilic graduated with his PhD in 2021 the WVU Navigation Laboratory as a graduate research assistant. During his studies at WVU, he has worked as the localization lead for the WVU Robotics team in the NASA Space Robotics Challenge Phase-2. He also worked on a proprioceptive localization algorithm for a sample return rover in the Fast Traversing Autonomous Rover for Mars Sample Collection project sponsored by NASA EPSCoR. His Ph.D. research focuses on space robotics localization applications using terramechanics relations with inertial sensors. He is a recipient of the Fulbright Ph.D. Scholarship (Turkish Fulbright Commission), Christopher Fellowship (WVU), Statler Fellowship (WVU), and JPL Visiting Student Research Program Fellowship (WVU).

Kilic graduated with a B.Sc. degree in Astronautical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University (ITU). During his undergraduate studies, Kilic was the team leader of the first Turkish can-sized microsatellite team and winner of a MERIT award. In his senior year, he participated in QB50, the international network of CubeSats project as a short training program student with a scholarship for development and deployment strategies for QB50 in the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Belgium.

Kilic received his M.Sc. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering from ITU, where he studied orbital mission analyses of CubeSats. He was a graduate researcher of the Space Systems Design and Test Laboratory at ITU. His work at SSDTL was related to trajectory optimization and orbital dynamics simulations for BeEagleSat CubeSat.

In his spare time, he enjoys playing video games, fishing, and spending time with his family.