Rising Technical Contributor Award

Mohsina Mahmood is a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace’s Navigation and Sensors Business. In this role, she is responsible for ensuring sound development and thorough testing of inertial navigation units (INUs) for land-based applications.

Mahmood joined Honeywell Aerospace as an intern in 2021, conducting system-level testing remotely during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This presented a challenge that Mahmood quickly overcame. In the first few months of her internship, she created a Python script that increased the efficiency of decoding binary files extracted from inertial navigation units for customer troubleshooting. She also developed a test plan to benchmark the performance of a potential alternative navigation solution for integration with INUs, and she took ownership of analyzing the system’s performance during hardware qualification testing with a new embedded M-code (military code) GPS receiver.

After her internship, Mahmood was recognized as a valuable asset to her team and was offered a full-time position. She demonstrated her adaptability and technical competence by working across four programs that brought their own challenges. She immediately jumped into supporting the Location and Attitude Determining System (LADS) program, where she defined use cases to characterize system performance and played a key role in a root-cause investigation to understand abnormal system behavior in the customer’s environment. Mahmood concurrently continued her work on the M-code program, where her analysis of the GPS receiver’s behavior highlighted critical findings that enabled her team to move forward with formal qualification efforts. She leveraged existing tools and resources in the lab to simulate an oscillatory environment for a capability called stationary position aiding mode, and she completed the functional testing for the program well ahead of schedule, resulting in substantial savings for Honeywell.

Mahmood went beyond expectations as an entry-level systems engineer by leading an internal cybersecurity assessment and delivering a plan of action and milestones that identified and mitigated potential cybersecurity risks within the development lab.

As a Muslim woman employed in a STEM discipline, Mahmood participates in outreach events at her local mosque that encourage young women and men to explore careers in science and engineering. Serving as the professional development chair and internal vice president for the SWE University of Central Florida Section, her proudest achievement is organizing a virtual, hands-on SWENext College Day event in Central Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through her leadership and dedication, the program was able to interactively demonstrate real-life applications of fundamental STEM concepts to more than 40 high school students. She serves as a role model and leader who can inspire students to get excited about learning, whether they choose to pursue a career in STEM or outside of it.

Mahmood holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Central Florida. In her free time, she enjoys reading new books, traveling, and playing tennis with her husband, Dalton. Thanks to Honeywell, she now plays pickleball as well.