Scholarship winner, chapter VP, composites researcher — and now a Boeing engineer

Ask Geenadie Rathnayake about her favorite AIAA memory and she doesn’t reach for an award ceremony or a technical competition. She reaches for a hot dog.

“One of my favorite memories was at the annual spring BBQ where we played games and ate hot dogs,” she says. “It was a really fun and a great way to spend time outside of classes with fellow classmates and professors. It’s one of those moments that made being part of AIAA feel more like a community.”

That instinct — that the community is the point — is what made her two years as Vice President of the University of Washington AIAA student chapter so effective. It’s also, notably, only part of the story. Over the same stretch, the A&A senior picked up a national AIAA scholarship, joined two research labs, worked the mechanical team on UW Solar Car, and interned at Boeing. This fall she starts there full time as a Structural Analysis Engineer.

At a glance

A national scholarship

In October 2025, AIAA named Geenadie the recipient of the Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship — one of four $3,000 scholarships awarded that year by the AIAA Digital Avionics Technical Committee, and part of a slate that recognized undergraduates from across the country.

It’s a competitive, national-level award, and it goes to students who pair strong academics with real technical direction. Geenadie qualifies on both counts.

Two labs and a solar car

The research résumé started at UW’s Ram Accelerator Lab, where she supported ongoing research activities. This past year she joined the G3MS Lab, working on Automated Fiber Placement in composite manufacturing — a process that lays down composite tape with robotic precision, and one of the more consequential problems in modern aerostructures. If you want to know why she landed in structures at Boeing, that’s a good place to start looking.

Alongside the lab work, she’s been part of the mechanical team at UW Solar Car — the kind of build-it-yourself, deadline-driven project that teaches things a lab bench doesn’t.

Two years as VP, and a calendar full of good reasons to show up

Geenadie served as Vice President of the UW chapter during both her junior and senior years. Her portfolio: planning and coordinating the social events that brought students through the door, promoting AIAA’s mission on campus, and running department merch.

Bowling night. The annual spring BBQ. Space Ball. On paper it reads like a party planning committee. In practice it was logistics, budgeting, vendor coordination, cross-team communication, and a whole lot of delegation.

“When organizing events, I had to work with my team to set up venues, plan the format of events, promote the event by working with social media managers, coordinate logistics like equipment and food, and delegate responsibilities to make sure the events ran smoothly,” she says. “I was fortunate to work with a great team that shared the same goals and commitments to make events successful.”

Leadership, collaboration, communication — the three skills every hiring manager in aerospace claims to want. Geenadie didn’t learn them from a workshop. She learned them by having to get a hundred people fed on a Saturday afternoon.

The network you build before you need it

Beyond the leadership reps, Geenadie points to two things AIAA gave her that a course catalog can’t.

The first is reach into industry. Through professional events run by both the UW student chapter and the AIAA Pacific Northwest Section, she connected with working professionals across a wide range of aerospace disciplines — the kind of exposure that turns “aerospace engineering” from an abstract major into a map of actual career paths.

The second is closer to home: her own department. Social and professional events alike gave her a way to connect with faculty and fellow students outside the pressure of a problem set. Those relationships tend to outlast the coursework.

The accomplishment she’s proudest of

For Geenadie and her leadership team, the win wasn’t a single event. It was the trend line.

“One of our proudest accomplishments for our chapter and our leadership team this year was reaching more students, from freshmen to graduate students, and seeing increased student participation and engagement at our events through our social media pages.”

Freshmen through grad students is a genuinely hard span to serve. Different schedules, different priorities, different reasons for walking in the room. Growing engagement across all of it — and using @aiaa_uw on Instagram and LinkedIn to do it — is a real organizational achievement, not just a good year.

For Geenadie, teamwork is the key to this success. She specifically credited fellow senior officers Kyan West, Kat Watson, Mak Sukimoto, Letizia Laura, Francisco Flores-Martinez, Sebastian Sosa as well as junior officers Kristina Nikolova, Zachary Stone-Undem, and Armanvir Baidwan, for making these accomplishments possible.

Her advice to AIAA PNW: meet students where they are

We asked Geenadie how the Section can stay relevant to students like her. Her answer was refreshingly concrete:

• Partner directly with student chapters on professional, technical, and social events. Co-planning gets you in front of students who might never seek out a Section event on their own.
• Bring alumni into the room. They widen the audience and give students a look at where their degree actually leads.
• Mix the formats. Networking nights, technical workshops, resume reviews with industry professionals, talks from working engineers, and purely social events. Her read on what lands hardest: “Students love technical and networking events.”
• Promote it properly. Social media isn’t an afterthought — it’s how the events get discovered in the first place.

What’s next

Geenadie spent this past summer interning at The Boeing Company, supporting the Structures Product Development team. She’s headed back — this time as a Structural Analysis Engineer. “Very exciting!” — her words, and fair enough.

She’s not planning to disappear from AIAA now that she’s graduated. She intends to keep attending events, conferences, and networking opportunities, and to turn back toward the students coming up behind her: showing up at student chapter networking events, connecting with students, and sharing what she learned.

Which is, when you think about it, the whole model working as designed. Someone welcomed her in. Now she’s the one holding the door.

Congratulations, Geenadie — from everyone at AIAA Pacific Northwest Section. We can’t wait to see what you build.

Follow Geenadie on LinkedIn: Geenadie Rathnayake – Aerospace Engineer

Keep up with the UW chapter at @aiaa_uw

Know an AIAA member whose story should be told? Reach out — we’re always looking for the next spotlight.