A NASA aerospace engineer spoke to the Lafayette College community on Wednesday about her research and work beyond the stars. She also wanted Lafayette students to know about her well-rounded college experience, telling students to make “relationships that last a lifetime.”
“Three things come to mind immediately,” said the speaker, Lara Lash ‘13. “One, wear sunscreen. Two, open up a Roth IRA. And then three, keep yourself well-rounded. I say this a lot; there’s no such thing as a soft skill. There’s just skill.”
Lash said during the lecture that her NASA work centers around developing a technology called “unsteady pressure sensitive paint.”
“It’s a spray paint that you put on a wind tunnel model to get surface pressure,” Lash explained, who has worked at NASA since 2020.
The alumna delivered the annual Judith A. Resnik Memorial Lecture in Colton Chapel, hosted by the engineering department.
Jenn Rossmann, the dean of engineering, who was Lash’s academic advisor, called Lash’s work at NASA “fascinating.”
“She told me when we first met that it was her goal to work for NASA,” Rossman said.
During the lecture, Lash explained that she is also collaborating with software developers and data visualization scientists to enhance NASA’s space launch system in preparation for the Artemis II mission, scheduled for May 2026. The mission is planned to be the first crewed mission to the vicinity of the Moon in over 50 years.
On top of Lash’s major in mechanical engineering, she also pursued a minor in history.
“I have a really strong passion for American colonial history and the American Revolution,” Lash said. “I really wanted to see what it was like to continue a formal education within history.”
Her time at Lafayette was shaped by her participation in several extracurricular activities, including club soccer and the Office of Admissions. She also studied abroad in Germany, which was part of the reason that she initially chose Lafayette.
“I made my best friend while abroad,” said Lash, who explained that it was “one of the better ways” to build relationships with other engineering students.
In her lecture, Lash also said that students should make connections with others, even if it just means “tagging along, even if you are not fitting in.”
The lecture was praised by students, with Julia Siskind ‘29 particularly enjoying learning about the paint that Lash studied.
“I feel like that’s the kind of thing that you don’t always think about when it comes to your space travel,” she said.
“I really enjoyed the lecture,” Elianna Calicchio ‘29 said. “I thought it was very educational and it really gave me an insight to the different aspects of NASA.”
“We hope Lara’s journey will inspire students who are thinking about their own goals,” Rossman said.
William Neil • Oct 19, 2025 at 8:45 am
Yes, a fascinating combination of experiences. Now for my question: what do you think Ms. Lash, of Elon Musk and his private sector ventures taking over from the old public sector NASA, dwarfing their funding and their old mission going back to the 1960’s?
I was an amateur astronomer in the 1960’s, with a 3″ Edmund Scientific reflector, cardboard tube and all, and a few years ago I went out one night to look for a comet just after dusk and saw a procession of lights about 4/5th magnitude moving in an orchestrated line from West to NE…had never seen anything like it. Russian/Chinese drones? Googling when I got home, it was apparently a just launched string of EM’s communication satellites, so dominant in our lives that they interfere with a nation’s ability to defend itself – Ukraine – against a brutal and bigger aggressor.
We all have our old NASA stereotypes from Apollo 13, but I’ll take crew-cut sturdy-nerdy engineers over the persona I’ve seen from Musk during his “public service” stint with the chainsaw. If you’re on the Republican Right, don’t use the word “Liberty” in front of me, the billionaire-trillionaire class has “incorporated” that word. They “own” Liberty.