Holly Dinkel, Ph.D.

Urbana, Illinois. 61801
I completed the Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering as a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in August 2025. Throughout the Ph.D., I was a Visiting Technologist with the NASA Ames Research Center Intelligent Robotics Group and the NASA Johnson Space Center Dexterous Robotics Laboratory researching Representing and Manipulating Deformable Linear Objects for robotics. I previously completed the M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics and a certificate in entrepreneurship at Stanford University and the B.S. and B.A. in Chemical Engineering and Music, respectively, at the University of Missouri.
Before journeying into robotics, I previously worked as a probabilistic risk assessment analyst for the Space Launch System at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, as a radioanalytical chemist developing new methods of processing theranostic medical radioisotopes at the DOE Argonne National Laboratory, and as an accelerator physicist designing hadron beam monitors for the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility at the DOE Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.