Victoria is currently the Director of Strategic Innovation at Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education (OAIRE). She oversees and coordinates engineering efforts, personnel, and strategy related to the institute and is passionate about developing the aerospace ecosystem within the state of Oklahoma and beyond. Victoria started taking flying lessons in high school and the time she spent as a student pilot instilled a passion for aerospace and aviation that has only grown. Her high school senior design project was funded through NASA while she was an undergraduate and her team competed and won the regional AIAA student design competition and was selected to present to a national AIAA conference in 2012. Victoria received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M at Kingsville in 2012 and worked as an aircraft structural design engineer for L3 Communications between 2012 and 2017. Once she decided to go back to school, Victoria dedicated herself to research and learned more about emerging technologies in the aerospace sector. This included overseeing and participating in multiple drone-based projects. She started her graduate degree at Oklahoma State University in 2017. Her MS thesis in mechanical and aerospace engineering consisted of studying the uses and applications of combining photogrammetric processes with unmanned aerial systems. She presented her research at over 8 local and national conferences between 2017 and 2019 and led small and large flight campaigns for OSU. After graduation, Victoria continued working with the Unmanned Systems Research Institute at Oklahoma State, starting as a research engineer, and moving to Director of Engineering in 2021. Now that she is at OAIRE, she is excited about the potential of the institute and the impact it will have. She works to meet adversity with tenacity and tries to find innovative solutions to systemic and stagnant processes.