CJ O'Neill

I’m a senior at CU Boulder studying aerospace engineering and minoring in planetary science.

Undergraduate Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics as a Spacecraft Systems Engineer for the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA) since the end of my freshman year. At LASP, I primarily work on astrodynamics simulations in Basilisk, which enable robust mission design. In April of 2025, I received 1st place an AIAA Student Conference, and was fully funded to present my work on optimizing baffle design for EMA at the 2026 AIAA SciTech Forum.

Lead of the sensor subteam in my senior projects group where I lead a team of 10 on our dead reckoning (GNSS denied) visual-inertial odometry unmanned aircraft system. Sensor fusion of IMUs, flight controllers, laser rangefinders, and more to accomplish a <2% error over a 600s GNSS denied flight.

Outside of school and LASP work, I’ve been performing research with Dr. Sean Peters into detecting the spread of a fungal pathogen ravaging Hawaiian forests with synthetic aperature radar. I learned about the issue during a birding tour in the big island in January 2025. Soon after, I began taking Radar & Remote Sensing with Dr.Peters and first thought of linking the two. During that semester and into the summer, I worked on developing first principles based SAR simulations of the problem. We expanded the team and with Benjamin Atkinson, trained a machine learning model to detect the disease.

In my free time, I’m probably either climbing, birding, hiking, or snowboarding. This summer I’ll be hiking the 2650 mile long Pacific Crest Trail raising money and awareness for the Alzheimer’s Association. Please consider donating to the gofundme.