Aj Verma turns solar car success to career in aeronautics
First he took apart his mum’s camera, then he built a solar car, now he is working on drones and flying cars: meet Aj Verma.
As a child Aj Verma wanted to know how things worked. At the age of 10, he would routinely take a part his parents cameras to see how the parts fit together. Almost 16 years later, Mr Verma has made a career out of it, and is at the forefront of the Australian aeronautics division as a mechanical engineer.
“I used to pull things apart and mess around with them, much to my mum’s frustration,” Mr Verma, from North Ryde, said.
“My parents aren’t technically minded people, they were in business, so they didn’t really know what I was doing.”
Mr Verma calls his fascination with dismantling and creating things a case of “itchy hands” and it helped him launch Western Sydney University’s solar car program to the spot of best in the world, beating Harvard and MIT to the top.
As the team leader while still a student Mr Verma was integral to getting the little red solar car from the Kingswood campus across the world for the American Solar Challenge, driving from the corn fields of Nebraska to the coast in Oregon.
“Getting involved in the solar car program made me realise why I got involved in engineering in the first place,” Mr Verma said.
“Winning the race was amazing. I was beyond ecstatic. Other students would laugh at us when we started and it made us think why are we putting so much effort into something that people didn’t understand, but the win was validating.”
The 26-year-old has continued to soar after the world first win, garnering a nomination for the university’s science and technology awards, and becoming a top contender for a position in SpaceX’s Mars rocket project, which he said was the biggest opportunity in his life.
“I remember I got the call from the SpaceX engineer while I was at Cape Canaveral in the USA, just as a tourist,” He said.
“It was so weird to be sitting on the hotel bed and talking with this rocket engineer just as I was about to see a rocket launch and know I could be a part of the industry.”
Mr Verma went through seven interviews and a factory floor tour of the SpaceX facility, making it to the final selection, when he was told his citizenship made him ineligible for the role.
“It was a kick in the guts. It is a rocket that I would be working on, and it can easily be converted to a carrier of nuclear weapons, so Australians haven’t been allowed to work on the project since 2014,” He said.
“My skills weren’t the reason I didn’t get the job, it was my citizenship, so I had to take a positive out of the whole experience.”
After a whirlwind 2018, Mr Verma is now working on creating the hardware to help commercial, military and aerospace vehicles fly in Australia, pushing the country’s aerospace programs forward at his current work place Advanced Power Drives based in Merrylands in western Sydney.
“We’re pushing the industry here in Australia. It’s hard to raise capital here if you’re not a software startup, and it’s definitely risky, but part of our area is dealing with risk and learning from the crashes, that’s what being in the solar car taught me, and now I’m using that on a larger scale.”
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