---
title: An Out-of-This-World Mentor
date: 2024-01-12T17:00:00-05:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://terp.umd.edu/an-out-of-this-world-mentor"
section: Articles
---
# An Out-of-This-World Mentor

*January 12, 2024* — by [Maggie Haslam](/authors/maggie-haslam)


- *Photos courtesy of David Akin*

> Adviser for Decades of Space, Robot Competitions Isn’t Powering Down

*student tests pressure suit — Shane Jacobs Ph.D. ’09 tests the MX-2 pressure suit in 2005.*

When engineering students sought an adviser to help them enter an international robotic sub showdown, aerospace engineering Professor David Akin had what it took to blow the competition out of the water: enthusiasm, expertise and a 367,000-gallon tank.


*David Akin portrait*


> “Dave jumps into these things with both feet, and that’s a sign of his commitment to students.”

— Christopher Cadou, professor of aerospace engineering


Because of Akin, Maryland has been a fixture at NASA’s national competition scene in contests like [RASC-AL](https://www.nasa.gov/stem-content/rasc-al-competition/), where Maryland has competed (and often won) since 2003, [X-Hab](https://spacegrant.org/programs/xhab/), which challenges students to design and build lunar habitats, and the Robo-Ops challenge, where students must navigate a rover through rock-strewn obstacle courses in Houston remotely from College Park. Akin is also a Maryland mentor for the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International’s RoboSub Competition. In it, students design, build and test an autonomous underwater vehicle in the university’s [neutral buoyancy tank](https://research.umd.edu/capabilities/core-facilities/neutral-buoyancy-research-facility-nbrf), which Akin had built with a NASA grant in 1990; it remains one of only two in the country.

“Professor Akin provides the resources to do the work and the freedom to just run with it,” says Natalie Condzal ’22, now an operation systems engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “He’s there to talk things through, but he’s not going to help you solve the problem, and that’s helped me find success in my career.”


*student helps test rover in desert — Justin Brannan ’12, M.S. ’14 helps test the student-built RAVEN astronaut support rover as part of NASA’s Desert RATS tests in the Arizona desert in 2010.*




**Issue:** [Winter 2024](https://terp.umd.edu/editions/winter-2024)


**Types:** [Campus Life](https://terp.umd.edu/category/campus-life)