Junfei Xie’s (’13 M.S., ’16 Ph.D.) research on unmanned aerial vehicle-based networked airborne computing earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Xie, an assistant professor at San Diego State University, will use the five-year award to develop a flying computing cluster that benefits current UAV applications and enables new ones. The project could potentially have an impact on a broad scope, from air traffic control to computing. An electrical engineering and computer science student at UNT, she developed theoretical and applied results to allow drones to communicate with each other under the guidance of Yan Wan, now a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, and Yan Huang, the UNT computer science and engineering department chair.