About a year ago, I became fascinated by how animals fly. As an engineering student, it surprised me that my courses barely covered natural flight. I soon realized that the reason why flapping-wing aerodynamics isn't taught to undergraduate engineers is that it's highly complicated. This only made me more interested.

I began searching for a tool that could help me create a flapping-wing micro-air vehicle (MAV). Unfortunately, there was no free, easy to use, and fast program for doing so. Therefore I decided to write my own! A few months later, I had created Ptera Software, a fast and straightforward aerodynamics solver for flapping-wing flight. After showing some professors, I was asked to continue the research in my university's lab. Since then, I have validated Ptera Software's accuracy against experimental data and more than tripled its computational efficiency.

However, after I graduate, I worry that I won't have the time to continue dedicating myself to Ptera Software. If I receive funding, I hope that it will allow me to continue to develop this tool and support the open-source community's understanding and interest in flapping-wing flight. With enough funding, I could even hire other developers to expand my tool's functionality by creating a user interface or implementing flexible wings aerodynamics!