During my undergraduate education, I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Pavlos Mikellides as part of the Barrett Honors College.  The end result was a paper that was submitted to the International Electric Propulsion Conference at Princeton in 2006.  

On a side self deprecating note from a 40 year old reflecting upon himself at in his mid 20’s, I was lucky enough to have Dr. Mikilledes present this paper on my behalf as I was not up to the task.  This was due to a pattern of behavior of avoiding presenting in any group situation in instead, writing all the MATLAB code, report, producing graphs, reviewing others work, etc… 

I had a great opportunity given to me,  but given feelings of inadequacy associated with being an undergraduate among what seemed to be only researchers in the field, I missed out.  I now use this as a teaching tool for all my honors students.  They all know that after 10 years of teaching, I have no issue talking in front of 150 people.  Which is why I push them to practice presenting with me and then require them to present to their class.  Hopefully my humble admittance of being human and making mistakes helps them to overcome their own anxiety.

“Numerical Simulation of a MW-Class Self Field Magnetoplasmadynamic Thruster using MACH 2 Code,” B. England and P.G. Mikellides, IEPC paper 2005 – 2006, Presented at the 29th International Electric Propulsion Conference, -Princeton University, N.J. Nov. 2005.

In the realm of research, one of the many practices of those within the field is to properly give credit to any of those who contributed to the work in any form. The following three papers were not composed by me, but used some results, figures, and verbiage from my original paper. Dr. Mikellides, Dr. James Gilland, and Nalan Ratnayake, were kind enough to list me as an Author given this inclusion. Their kindness was not only appreciated, but actually shocking as I discovered this a few years later when constructing my first CV in preparation to teach at the Maricopa Community College District.

“Modeling of Plasma Thrusters”, Mikellides, P.G.; Ratnayake, N, England, B. The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science, 2006.

“Energy Deposition via Magnetoplasmadynamic Acceleration”, Pavlos G. Mikellides; Brian England; James H. Gilland, Proceedings of the 2006 International Congress on advances in Nuclear Power Plants,” ICAPP06 2006

“Energy Deposition via Magnetoplasmadynamic Acceleration, Part II: Modeling and Performance Predictions,” Pavlos G. Mikellides and Brian England, Plasma Sources Science and Technology.