Sheppard takes a people-first approach to much of his day-to-day operations.

Being a chief engineer, its really about meeting and connecting with the different groups within our team, to make sure Im understanding what different people are working on, and supporting everyone to deliver their analysis and conclusions, he said.

As Im getting more senior, Im trying to do less meetings and be able to talk to people. Im finding that, naturally, its important to communicate with the engineers and the team but also the manufacturing and flight test teams as well.

Integrating the various engineering disciplines and broad multidisciplinary feedback is a real focus of mine.

Sheppard, who was part of the team who constructed the first military aircraft to be built in Australia for 50 years, said he was pleasantly surprised by the rise of Australia-based aerospace projects.

When I started in my career, I was under the impression that big programs were always going to be run out of the US or Europe, he said. The 787 program was a large program here in Australia to recently break that perception.

We developed a new carbon composite material system for the whole wing movable trailing edge, the first composite material system developed by Boeing Commercial outside of the US. The program had a complex design and certification effort, and the ongoing manufacturing has been a big contribution to local industry.

Another fellowship recipient is Dr Yan Yang, the software engineering lead at Boeings advanced prototyping arm Phantom Works International, and an expert in machine learning and complex software systems.

My work includes the development of the state-of-art, deep learning solutions for autonomous systems, she said. My passion is to build reliable, safe and ethical AI systems for the next generation of aerospace engineering products.

Yangs lifelong passion for physics and mathematics initially launched her into a career in manufacturing engineering at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China. She then made a detour into a rather different field prior to joining Boeing.

I was always fascinated by space from a very young age, she said. But I did not know too much about the real world, so I decided to become a TV journalist.

After three years in journalism, Yang completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Queensland, before starting work at Boeing in 2016.

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A day in the life of an aerospace engineer - Create - create digital