Lexie Felderman Receives the Outstanding MS Mechanical Engineering Student Award

Congratulations to Lexie for receiving the Spring 2026 Outstanding MS Mechanical Engineering Student Award! This award recognizes personal academic achievement and contributions to an inclusive learning environment.

Lexie’s path as a STEM student is nontraditional; coming from an economics background, she’s taken postbaccalaureate math, physics, and engineering courses to climb the learning curve of pursuing graduate study in engineering. She combines her interdisciplinary interests through research on nontechnical factors shaping technological innovation, focusing on post-WWII nuclear reactor development among competing global powers to investigate the role of ideology on technical design. She’s interested in how early problem framing determines available technological trajectories and how we interact with those trajectories over time.

Outside the lab, Lexie represents the mechanical engineering graduate program as an MS Program Ambassador, developing relationships with prospective students and organizing community events for those already in the program. She also manages a restaurant and spends her evenings and weekends serving, bartending, and developing wine education content.