For 10 years, a NASA initiative has helped the agency produce breakthrough aeronautical innovations while fostering the aviation workforce of tomorrow – and the University Leadership Initiative (ULI) is still flying high, making awards with the potential to change 21st century air travel. 

Through ULI, NASA has supported more than 1,100 students at 100 schools, allowing them to pursue advancements in top priority areas for U.S. aviation, including high-speed flight, advanced air mobility, future airspace management and safety, and electrified propulsion.  

Many of those students have used their ULI experience as a springboard to careers in aviation. And many of their ideas — such as designing more efficient wings or building supersonic aircraft that can change shape in flight — are either being investigated further by industry or the technologies adopted outright.  

As it celebrates a decade of success, NASA’s ULI team is looking forward to leveraging student innovations with new awards in 2026 and beyond. 

“Through ULI we’re building the workforce of the future and fostering the skill sets we so desperately need to compete globally,” said John Cavolowsky, director of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 

What makes ULI unique from other NASA research projects, and especially appealing to universities, is that it provides the opportunity for university students and faculty to propose what research to conduct.  

Usually, NASA determines the research it needs and then does the work itself or through partnerships and contracts. But with ULI, the agency shares its goals and universities consider how they can best help realize them.  

“There are no better ways in my mind to help develop that talent within the students than to engage them in identifying big problems and then give them the resources they need to use their creativity to solve them,” Cavolowsky said.  

NASA’s relationship with academia and reliance on its research proficiency is written into NASA’s DNA going back to the days of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, from which NASA was formed in 1958. 

“For more than a century we have leaned on the brilliance and the capabilities of universities to help us think,” Cavolowsky said. “With ULI we can ensure they continue to bring their fresh ideas and young energy to the work we do at NASA Aeronautics.”  

ULI evolved from an earlier project called Leading Edge Aeronautics Research for NASA (LEARN). NASA selected five LEARN teams in 2015 to pursue truly outside of the box ideas that showed promise but needed additional study.  

One of those teams, for example, sought to take a cue from migrating flocks of birds by asking if airliners could save fuel by cruising in a giant ‘V’ formation. The numbers were intriguing and simple flight tests proved the concept, although the idea never made it to practice. 

Slightly retooled but keeping the innovative spirit of LEARN, ULI was officially announced in 2016 and a year later NASA selected five teams of university professors and students to contribute solutions to the biggest aeronautical challenges of the 21^st century. 

A decade later, NASA has made a total of $220 million in awards to 33 teams over eight rounds of solicitations 

One of the earliest selected ULI teams was led by James Coder, who at the time was an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His team worked on technology that would smooth the airflow around a wing to make it more efficient. 

Technically known as slotted natural laminar flow (SNLF) wings, Coder has called the idea a potential game changer for commercial airliners. The more efficient wing would mean less drag on an airplane, which in turn could help airlines save money on fuel. 

Coder credits ULI for not only helping to prove the technology’s effectiveness – with the aid of wind tunnel testing at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California – but for providing students with an experience they couldn’t get elsewhere. 

“After 10 years industry remains interested in the SNLF technology and I am optimistic for good reason about its future,” Coder said. “And project alumni have gone on to do many wonderful things and leverage what they did and learned through the ULI.” 

With ULI experience prominent on their resumes, several of the students on Coder’s team wound up with jobs in industry – such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin – and government labs. One is currently a NASA Pathways intern working on his PhD. 

Now at Pennsylvania State University, Coder remains a strong advocate for ULI. 

“It goes above and beyond simple workforce development,” he said. “We recognized early on the value-add of ULI is the students themselves. While we could have just trained students en masse, we wanted to put them in the front seat of technical leadership on the project. I think this was a very successful strategy that benefited the project and the students as they embarked on their careers.” 

Forrest Carpenter is another example of a student whose ULI support led to work after graduation – in this case at NASA.  

“Working on the ULI project was an incredible experience, one I will always be thankful for and will remember fondly,” Carpenter said. “I think the project challenged me to be something more than ‘just an engineer;’ really helping my professional development and giving me a clearer focus on my passion.”  

As a student at Texas A&M, he was part of a team selected by NASA in 2017 to research a novel idea in which a supersonic aircraft could alter its shape to fly more efficiently based on the atmospheric conditions in real time. Dimitris Lagoudas, now the university’s interim department head for aerospace engineering, led the team.  

A laser shooting out ahead of the aircraft would take measurements of the oncoming air and then the aircraft’s computer would command patches of shape memory alloys and other mechanisms to morph the aircraft’s outer shape. 

One possible application of the technology could be in contributing to the reduction of the loudness of a sonic boom, expanding on the science behind NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic technology demonstrator that seeks to reduce the sonic boom to a sonic thump.  

“My main research role on the team was performing Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations of the various geometries we were looking at, including a pre-production version of X-59,” Carpenter said.  

His work on the idea continues. A follow-on NASA project, GoSWIFT, will flight test the core technologies Carpenter and his ULI team worked on at Texas A&M. Only this time, Carpenter is the co-lead for the tests, which are targeted to take place at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California in the near future.  

Carpenter’s enthusiasm for his work and gratitude for how ULI led to his career with NASA resonates with many other ULI alumni.  

“The number of students impacted, and how they were impacted, by a long-term project like ULI is huge,” Carpenter said. “NASA’s involvement in this kind of activity can only strengthen the research done in this country and to help inspire and develop the next generation of our workforce.”  

ULI is supported by the Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program within NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, which publishes ULI solicitations and other opportunities to collaborate with the agency’s aeronautical innovators.