Gatza is a Self Graduate Fellow and president of KUbeSat, a KU student organization working to send satellites to space. He also interned at NASA, where he worked on combustion modeling for rocket engines. 

Space has always been a fascination for him. When he was young, he wanted to be an astrophysicist, but during his senior year of high school, his interests shifted. 

“I realized that I wanted to help humanity get to space rather than just study space,” he said. “I’m specifically working on rocket propulsion stuff, so the space side of aerospace.” 

Gatza’s research is in reacting flow simulations, which use equations to model what is happening inside rocket engines and what can make an engine fail and explode. 

“These simulations are a powerful tool, but they’re very, very computationally expensive,” he said. “They take a really long time to run. So we run them in parallel on many computers, sometimes thousands at the same time, and it can still take months to get a few milliseconds of data.” 

His goal is to create quality models that also don’t take as long to generate data. He wants his research to not only live in the academic realm but also be used in the industry to develop new propulsion technologies. 

Gatza said he wouldn’t have been able to achieve any of this without his undergraduate scholarships and his Self Graduate Fellowship. 

“I probably wouldn’t have been at college if I didn’t have these scholarships,” he said. “And the same thing for grad school. The money helps and lets me focus on my research rather than having a part-time job and focusing on making ends meet.” 

Undergraduate tuition for the KU School of Engineering is $13,407 for residents and $31,737 for nonresidents. The School of Engineering offers scholarships for incoming freshmen that scale on both high school GPA and ACT or SAT scores. 

“I think a lot of people take that for granted because there are baseline scholarships that a lot of people can get,” Gatza said. “Those don’t just happen. People have to make donations for that, so it really is a very impactful thing that can change someone’s life.” 

KU students receive almost $69 million in loans, according to the 2024–2025 financial aid Common Data Set. Student debt in the U.S. totals over $1.7 trillion, according to a 2025 report from Education Data Initiative. Donating to scholarships and fellowships can ease some of the financial burden KU students face. 

“I would love for as many people to donate as possible,” Gatza said. “I hope to do so myself one day.” 

Want to support students like Brody Gatza who are doing great things? You can give directly to a scholarship fund for aerospace engineering students. For information about other ways to give to the School of Engineering, reach out to Caleb Regan, development director at KU Endowment, at 785-832-7321 or [email protected].