Current U.S. Air Force Maj. Adam Fuhrmann ’11 is the GEL Program’s first astronaut candidate! He is one of 10 individuals chosen from a field of 8,000 applicants for the 2025 astronaut candidate class, NASA announced today in a live ceremony. Watch Fuhrmann’s introduction.
This is NASA’s 24th class of astronaut candidates since the first Mercury 7 astronauts were chosen in 1959.
The class now begins two years of training that includes instruction and skills development for complex operations aboard the International Space Station, Artemis missions to the Moon, and beyond. Specifically, training includes robotics, land and water survival, geology, foreign language, space medicine and physiology, and more, while also conducting simulated spacewalks and flying high-performance jets.
A Course 16 alum, Fuhrmann has served as a U.S. Air Force Fighter Pilot and Experimental Test Pilot for nearly 14 years. (Bio below.) While at MIT, he was a member of Air Force ROTC Detachment 365 and was selected as the third-ever student leader of the GEL Program as a GEL2 in spring 2011.
GEL Founding and Executive Director Leo McGonagle recalled that Fuhrmann was a very early participant in GEL from 2009-11 and one of only 11 students in the GEL2 cohort then.
“The GEL Program was still in its infancy during this time and was in somewhat of a fragile state as we were seeking to grow and cement ourselves as a viable MIT program. As the fall 2010 semester was winding down, it was evident that the program needed an effective GEL2 student leader during the spring semester, who could lead by example and inspire fellow students and who was an example of what right looks like. I knew Adam was already an emerging leader as a senior cadet in MIT’s Air Force ROTC Detachment, so I tapped him for the role of spring student leader of GEL,” said McGonagle.
Fuhrmann initially sought to decline this role, citing his time as a leader in ROTC. But McGonagle, having led the Army ROTC Program prior to GEL, felt that the GEL Student Leader role would challenge and develop Fuhrmann in other ways. In GEL, he would be charged with leading and inspiring students from a broad background of experiences, and focused exclusively on leading within engineering contexts, while engaging with engineering industry organizations.
“GEL needed strong student leadership at this time, so Adam took on the role, and it ended up being a win-win for both him and the program. He later expressed to me that the experience challenged him in ways that he hadn’t anticipated and complemented his Air Force ROTC leadership development. He was grateful for the opportunity, and the program stabilized and grew under Adam’s leadership. He was the right student at the right time and place,” said McGonagle.
Fuhrmann’s place for the next two years will be NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. When he completes basic training, Fuhrmann will receive his astronaut pin and become the 45th MIT alum to become a flight-eligible astronaut.
Fuhrmann has remained connected to the GEL program. He asked McGonagle to administer his oath of commissioning into the U.S. Air Force, with his entire family in attendance, at the historic Bunker Hill Monument in Boston. “One of my proudest GEL memories,” said McGonagle, who is a former U.S. Army Lt. Colonel.
Throughout his time in service which included overseas deployments, Fuhrmann has actively participated in Junior Engineering Leader’s Roundtable leadership labs (ELLs) with GEL students, and he has kept in touch with his GEL2 cohort.
“Adam’s GEL2 cohort meets informally once or twice a year, usually via Zoom, to share and discuss professional challenges, lessons learned, life stories, to keep in touch with each other. This small but excellent group of GEL alum is committed to staying connected and supporting one another, as part of the broader GEL community,” said McGonagle.
“We are tremendously proud of Adam for this notable accomplishment, and we look forward to following his journey through astronaut candidate school and beyond.”
Congratulations Adam!
About Adam Fuhrmann
Adam Fuhrmann, 35, major, U.S. Air Force, is from Leesburg, Virginia, and has accumulated more than 2,100 flight hours in 27 aircraft, including the F-16 and F-35. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and master’s degrees in flight test engineering and systems engineering from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and Purdue University, respectively. He has deployed in support of Operations Freedom’s Sentinel and Resolute Support, logging 400 combat hours. At the time of his selection, Fuhrmann served as the director of operations for an Air Force flight test unit.
2025 Astronaut Candidate Class
U.S. Army CW3 Ben Bailey, U.S. Air Force Maj. Cameron Jones, Katherine Spies, Anna Menon, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Erin Overcash, U.S. Air Force Maj. Adam Fuhrmann, Dr. Lauren Edgar, Yuri Kubo, Rebecca Lawler, and Dr. Imelda Muller.
Developing new technologies that improve people’s lives is what motivates Evan Hostetler most as an automotive engineer. So, it’s no surprise that he is currently working on the next-generation Chevy Bolt, which promises to make electric cars more accessible to more people.
“Electrification is where the investment and new developments are now,” said Evan ’22 (Course 2-A). “I enjoy the challenge of trying to do more with a technology, push the boundaries in some way. The Chevy Bolt might not be the highest performing electric car, but the goal is for it to be one of the most affordable for people.”
As a kid, Evan never dreamed he would be working on electric cars, but he sure dreamed of being in the auto industry.
“I’m a lifelong car lover. I’ve been reading car magazines since I was eight years old. I grew up around cars, worked at a mechanic shop in high school, and always intended to be in the auto world. It’s really cool to be someone now influencing new vehicles coming to market.”
His road to General Motors began when he landed an internship in Detroit as a sophomore. For a mechanical engineering major with a concentration in product design – and a passion for all things cars – it was a natural fit. GM hired him full time after graduation.
His first engineering role was developing components for seats (“incredibly complicated engineering, because of all the safety and durability and comfort aspects”) before moving to Assistant Program Engineering Manager on the Chevy Bolt program.
“I work with vehicle systems engineers who represent different areas of the vehicle – interior, exterior, chassis, battery, motors, etc. We work closely together to optimize the design and make design tradeoffs for profitability or performance. I also interact with other functions in the company such as purchasing, quality, and manufacturing.”
He credits his GEL1 and GEL2 experiences with giving him the capabilities and confidence to excel in those settings, something many of his peers lack.
“My GEL experience is one of the most valuable and stickiest experiences of my undergrad. Engineering is such a team sport. If you’re developing any product or service, you do not do that in a room with your door shut. You have to be able to work on teams and build those relationships to execute really hard engineering problems.”
Evan says the GEL program taught him how to be a better engineering leader – how to ask questions, negotiate, make tradeoffs, influence people, align and execute, and know when to lead and not to lead. The Engineering Leadership Labs gave him the opportunity to practice those skills.
“The labs taught me how to quickly evaluate situations, do up-front analysis, take the core information I needed, and have healthy tension and debate with other engineers coming from different perspectives.”
As a GEL 2, he further developed team-leadership skills that he uses on the job now. “I was tasked with building a team, deciding who would be the functional leaders, and creating a culture of excellence where everyone is contributing. I’m just starting to see the need for those skills pop into my career.”
It doesn’t hurt that many of the capabilities he learned as a GEL student are highly valued by GM.
“They have behavior guides for their employees that mirror the behaviors practiced in the GEL program. Essentially, GEL’s effective engineering capabilities are part of employee performance at GM. There’s a mutual understanding that this is what it takes to succeed.”
Evan makes a point of giving back to the program that helped launch his career. He returns to GEL annually to facilitate a class session on vehicle architecture decision-making in the 16.810 Engineering Design & Rapid Prototyping class. And you might find him at an ELL giving an industry perspective to current GELs.
He says his goal is to continue working on products that add value to people’s lives. If he were to apply the product design framework to his career, he would be “at the end of the concept specification stage. I’ve accumulated a number of experiences that inform future direction, set some hard points around non negotiables for the type of work I like to do, but I am still very open to the particular details of what that looks like and how it develops.”
Every January, GEL students learn engineering project management skills in a rigorous, hands-on course held at Camp Cody in Freedom, NH. Some GEL alumni return year after year to serve as project team mentors and course assistants.
As an electrical engineering student at Stanford University in the late 1970s, L. Rafael Reif was working on not only his PhD but also learning a new language.
“I didn’t speak English. And I saw that it was easy to ignore somebody who doesn’t speak English well,” Reif recalled. To him, that meant speaking with conviction.
“If you have tremendous technical skills, but you cannot communicate, if you cannot persuade others to embrace that, it’s not going to go anywhere. Without the combination, you cannot persuade the powers-that-be to embrace whatever ideas you have.”
Now MIT president emeritus, Reif recently joined Anantha P. Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer and dean of the School of Engineering (SoE), for a fireside chat. Their focus: the importance of developing engineering leadership skills — such as persuasive communication — to solve the world’s most challenging problems.
SoE’s Technical Leadership and Communication Programs (TLC) sponsored the chat. TLC teaches engineering leadership, teamwork, and technical communication skills to students, from undergrads to postdocs, through its four programs: Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP), Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL), Communication Lab (Comm Lab), and Riccio-MIT Graduate Engineering Leadership Program (GradEL).
About 175 students, faculty, and guests attended the fireside chat. Relaxed, engaging, and humorous — Reif shared anecdotes and insights about technical leadership from his decades in leadership roles at MIT.
Reif had a transformational impact on MIT. Beginning as an assistant professor of electrical engineering in 1980, he rose to head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), then served as provost from 2005 to 2012 and MIT president from 2012 to 2022.
He was instrumental in creating the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in 2018, as well as establishing and growing MITx online open learning and MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories.
With an ability to peer over the horizon and anticipate what’s coming, Reif used an array of leadership skills to develop and implement clear visions for those programs.
“One of the things that I learned from you is that as a leader, you have to envision the future and make bets,” said Chandrakasan. “And you don’t just wait around for that. You have to drive it.”
Turning new ideas into reality often meant overcoming resistance. When Reif first proposed the College of Computing to some fellow MIT leaders, “they looked at me and they said, no way. This is too hard. It’s not going to happen. It’s going to take too much money. It’s too complicated. OK, then starts the argument.”
Reif seems to have relished “the argument,” or art of persuasion, during his time at MIT. Though hearing different perspectives never hurt.
“All of us have blind spots. I always try to hear all points of view. Obviously, you can’t integrate all of it. You might say, ‘Anantha, I heard you, but I disagree with you because of this.’ So, you make the call knowing all the options. That is something non-technical that I used in my career.”
On the technical side, Reif’s background as an electrical engineer shaped his approach to leadership.
“What’s beautiful about a technical education is that you understand that you can solve anything if you start with first principles. There are first principles in just about anything that you do. If you start with those, you can solve any problem.”
Also, applying systems-level thinking is critical — understanding that organizations are really systems with interconnected parts.
“That was really useful to me. Some of you in the audience have studied this. In a system, when you start tinkering with something over here, something over there will be affected. And you have to understand that. At a place like MIT, that’s all the time!”
Reif was asked: If he were assembling a dream team to tackle the world’s biggest challenges, what skills or capabilities would he want them to have?
“I think we need people who can see things from different directions. I think we need people who are experts in different disciplines. And I think we need people who are experts in different cultures. Because to solve the big problems of the planet, we need to understand how different cultures address different things.”
Reif’s upbringing in Venezuela strongly influenced his leadership approach, particularly when it comes to empathy, a key trait he values.
“My parents were immigrants. They didn’t have an education, and they had to do whatever they could to support the family. And I remember as a little kid seeing how people humiliated them because they were doing menial jobs. And I remember how painful it was to me. It is part of my fabric to respect every individual, to notice them. I have a tremendous respect for every individual, and for the ability of every individual that didn’t have the same opportunity that all of us here have to be somebody.”
Reif’s advice to students who will be the next generation of engineering leaders is to keep learning because the challenges ahead are multidisciplinary. He also reminded them that they are the future.
“What are our assets? The people in this room. When it comes to the ecosystem of innovation in America, what we work on is to create new roadmaps, expand the roadmaps, create new industries. Without that, we have nothing. Companies do a great job of taking what you come up with and making wonderful things with it. But the ideas, whether it’s AI, whether it’s deep learning, it comes from places like this.”
Alice Hall ’26 (Course 10) and Kayla Robertson ’26 (Course 2) are well-prepared for leadership roles as GEL2s… and beyond. In addition to excelling as GEL1s last year, they recently attended the McDonald Conference for Leaders of Character (MCLC). The conference is held annually at the United States Military Academy at West Point (USMA), which has been developing exceptional leaders for generations.
While the setting was imposing – the nation’s oldest engineering school (founded in 1802), granite edifices, historic monuments – Kayla and Alice were in familiar territory when it came to the leadership concepts they were learning.
“It was great to put what we’re learning in GEL, the leadership that we’re learning in GEL, the vocabulary that we’re using, into conversations with people that are doing similar things, people outside of our GEL bubble,” said Kayla.
“My group leader spoke about things that were completely aligned with the GEL curriculum, so I was able to ask thoughtful questions,” said Alice.
The GEL program regularly sends one or two top students to represent MIT at the MCLC, which was founded by benefactors The Honorable Robert A. “Bob” and Diane McDonald.
Robert A. McDonald served as Secretary of Veterans Affairs from 2014-1017. Previously, he was Chairman, President, and CEO of Procter & Gamble. He graduated from USMA in the top two percent of his class and served primarily with the 82nd Airborne Division.
The conference brings together undergraduate students from across the country and globe to improve their real-world leadership, critical thinking, and collaboration skills. West Point cadets also actively participate, making the experience truly unique.
“We started each day with optional PT (physical training) – since it is West Point – which we were able to join them on. We got to have a few meals in the historic Cadet Mess with all the cadets and interact with them. Two cadets were also part of each group.” said Kayla.
World and industry leaders are brought in to serve as group leaders – or Senior Fellows – who lead panel discussions and mentor students in small groups. Interacting with the likes of the CEO of LA28 and the COO of Ralph Lauren was a highlight for the GEL students.
“The types of talent that it attracts from the Senior Fellows was really impressive to me,” said Alice. “The Senior Fellows participated in panels where you could then ask them questions and then debrief within your small groups. GEL prepared me to know what to say and have the leadership vocabulary to have productive conversations with them.”
Meeting undergrads from other universities was another highlight of the conference. Both students said they will apply what they learned from students, cadets, and Senior Fellows to their GEL 2 roles and beyond.
“I came back with a clearer sense of what leadership is in big companies. They’re the people that are anchoring the culture of the companies. Now having spoken to a few CEOs and hearing them share their experiences through tough times and good times at their companies, I have a better idea of what they do and how their idea of leadership shapes their company,” said Kayla.
“It was really impactful to hear real world examples. These industry people are telling you stories of what happened to them. I was about to run for president (of MIT Undergraduate Association), and I was thinking a lot about the culture of the UA when I was having those conversations. The importance of culture was really hammered in and it’s something that I hope to bring to the rest of my leadership roles,” said Alice.
(Alice has since been elected MIT UA President for the coming academic year!)
The conference ended with a speech and discussion led by Reynold Hoover, Chief Executive Officer of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games. “An amazing talk because it solidified all the principles that we had talked about before and how challenging that process is and how his outlook on his leadership helps,” said Kayla.
Followed by one more highlight of the weekend – Karaoke night. “Some of the Senior Fellows participated and I was singing Sweet Caroline with Bob McDonald, which was insane!” said Alice.
For the fifth consecutive year, the GEL program has donated funds to MIT Edgerton Center’s engineering project teams whose members have successfully completed GEL’s one- or two-year Engineering Leadership development program while actively practicing the leadership and teamwork skills learned in GEL.
This year’s donations include $10,000 to the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team and $9,000 to the MIT Motorsports Team, as well as support for many other teams. (Amounts are based on number of GEL students actively participating on the teams.)
MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team Check Presentation
Left-right: Deepta Gupta (GEL student), Emma Nakahodo-Bernardino (GEL student), John Feiler (GEL Student Programs/Leadership Specialist), Leala Nakagawa, Tessa Uviedo (GEL student), Eileen Milligan (GEL Student and Industry Relations Manager), Nicole Lin, Leo McGonagle (GEL Executive Director)
MIT Motorsports Team Check Presentation
Left-right: Eric Zhou (GEL student, team captain), Claudius Tewari (GEL students), Liong Ma, Caroline Jiang, John Feiler (GEL Student Programs/Leadership Specialist), Leo McGonagle (GEL Executive Director), Veer Jhaveri
Congratulations to all of our 2025 GELumni! Great to see everyone at the GEL Completion Ceremony on May 14. Contact Eileen to request photo of you receiving your certificate. Grads- send us your new email and stay in touch!
Getting back into ELL mode… For our first Engineering Leadership Lab (ELL) of the spring semester, we challenged each team to design, build, and test a working prototype of a sorting device, using only available materials, under time pressure.
About Engineering Leadership Lab
GEL’s highly innovative weekly Engineering Leadership Lab (ELL) provides a “playing field” that serves as the core of our students’ engineering leadership development. Students participate in immersive, team-based activities designed to challenge their assumptions and hone their leadership, teamwork, and communications skills. Each ELL focuses on one or more of the Capabilities of Effective Engineering Leaders, with active participation by engineering industry leaders, who also share their real-world experiences. These activities provide opportunities for students to lead their peers and serve on teams, while fostering growth and learning individually and within their team.
The bridge project was a highlight of GEL’s four-day Project Engineering course during IAP. Student teams tackled the challenge of designing a bridge to precise specs and building a prototype with real materials under intense time pressure. Instructors and GEL alums played the roles of govt officials. The annual course gives students a solid introduction to project management principles, methods, and tools in a realistic context.
What better way to spend part of IAP than developing a climate control system for an electric vehicle. The challenge for students taking GEL’s Engineering Design & Rapid Prototyping course was to design a system that quickly heated/cooled the cabin and filtered air more cleanly than traditional vehicles, while not using too much electricity. Teams proved their concepts by building and testing multiple prototypes, then presented their solutions to an “automaker” panel.
