Petek Saracoglu ’05 has been singularly focused on one thing her entire life: airplanes. Not just flying in them, or flying them herself (which she does), but how they fly. “I’ve been very aerospace-directed since I was a kid,” she says. “Nothing ever interested me the same way airplanes do.” Petek is now a flight sciences engineer at Zunum Aero, a startup company in Kirkland, WA, where she’s helping to design the world’s first hybridelectric airplane. If her passion had a flight map, she could trace its beginnings to somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean as she flew with her parents from the U.S. to Istanbul, Turkey, every summer. “I thought pilots were the coolest,” she says. Seated next to her on the plane, Petek’s father, who she says, “is also an engineer and a total nerd,” would draw diagrams of the engine and explain how the airplane flew. “I learned about the compression cycle of an engine when I was 11 from my dad,” she says. She earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from MIT, and a master’s degree from the University of Washington in aerospace, aeronautical, and astronautical engineering.
FROM THE TR IA NGLE
PETEK SARACOGLU
As an engineer for Zunum Aero, a startup company near Seattle, Petek is helping to design the world’s first hybridelectric plane that relies on batteries and fuel. With renewable energy, the plane could become emission free in the future.
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