Prize for aeronautical engineering student
Published: 1 May 2026
Simon Fraser, a 5th year student on MEng in Aeronautical Engineering, has won the PEGASUS student competition, held at the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, on 17th April 2026.
Simon Fraser, a 5th year student on MEng in Aeronautical Engineering, has won the PEGASUS student competition, held at the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, on 17th April 2026.
Simon’s MEng individual project, supervised by Dr Craig White, was titled 'An Experimental Framework to Investigate Icy Plumes on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus', and involved some experimental work using the vacuum chamber at the Acre Road laboratory.
He created an ice-based converging-diverging nozzle with a liquid reservoir at its base to simulate the icy plumes found on Enceladus. He achieved sustained supersonic flow and capture the emission of ice grains, a first in this specific use case.
Simon Fraser with the award certificate.
Simon said: “I’m very grateful for the opportunity to attend the PEGASUS conference, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and insightful experience to see the work of the best European aerospace Master’s students. Winning first prize was a proud moment and is one of the highlights of my time at the University of Glasgow. My thanks go to Dr Craig White, PGR student Andrew Wilson, Dr Matteo Ceriotti, and Dr Ian Taylor for their support.”
The PEGASUS conference gives students the opportunity of experiencing the setting of an international conference, improving communication skills in a professional environment, and starting to build their own professional network, and a competition is organised to award the best project (paper and presentation). This year, 40 students from European partner universities presented their thesis.
PEGASUS is the partnership of the best European aerospace universities and currently has 31 members in 12 different European countries. Today more than 3000 aerospace engineers graduate at Master level from the member institutions of PEGASUS each year. The objective of PEGASUS is to offer highly relevant educational and research programmes and thereby attracting the best students and scientists. Co-ordinated change, exchange of staff and students and innovation will be required to achieve these objectives.
(l-r): Dr Matteo Ceriotti, the University's PEGASUS representative, and winner Simon Fraser.
The James Watt School of Engineering's dr Matteo Ceriotti is the University of Glasgow's PEGASUS representative. He said: “I am delighted that Simon won; the University of Glasgow panel had a hard time to select the best MEng project and student to represent the University, this year we had an exceptional number of Aerospace students applying to participate, and all projects were extremely good.
"Simon’s project stood out for its interdisciplinarity between aerodynamics and space science, and its outstanding experimental set-up and results. The victory traditionally comes with a duty: organising the student competition next year, hosted by KTH in Stockholm, Sweden! I would like to thank Dr Ian Taylor, head of discipline for Aerospace Engineering, for the continuous support given to the PEGASUS network.”
First published: 1 May 2026