At the end of April, six teams from all four of the University of California’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) campuses (UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz) gathered in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley, to present to a full house of peers, judges and aviation experts for the chance to win a 2025-26 CITRIS Aviation Prize.
Launched in 2021, the CITRIS Aviation Prize project is an annual competition organized by CITRIS Aviation, a research initiative of CITRIS. Each year, students are tasked with designing an element of an air taxi system to connect the campuses. In 2024-25, students created an aviation simulation, algorithms for eVTOLs, and an operation plan for the proposed system rollout. The previous year, they focused on conceptual designs for air mobility infrastructure.
This time, students were challenged to design a vertiport (vertical airport) placement simulation tool for California Airlink, the state’s first advanced air mobility (AAM) network, with the intention of connecting CITRIS campuses via an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
“Over the previous two competitions, it started with small components, building up to larger software efforts,” longtime judge and Deputy Director of Aeronautics at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Leighton Quon, said. “Over the years, it’s built up to be this overall concept.”
Now it’s time to put the puzzle pieces together.
Teams were judged on simulation software design, vertiport placement and routing, safety and emergency systems, scalability and roadmap, sustainability and environmental integration, innovation and vision, and economic feasibility.
Winners received cash prizes ranging from $1,500 to $5,000, divided among team members, with funding from CITRIS Aviation, and sponsors Jeppesen ForeFlight, Monterey Bay DART, Atech and MathWorks.
“It’s super-aligned with our mission, and so it’s been a natural fit on that basis,” said Josh Metz, the executive director of Monterey Bay DART, which gave a $2,000 prize in its name. “Sponsoring the competition has given us the opportunity to contribute to student projects through mentorship functions or the chance to review and comment on the projects as they mature over the course of each year.”
Four teams brought home awards for their proposals:
UC Davis: Davis Vision to Mission
- Award: Atech Award for Most Innovative Design for Air Mobility, $5,000
- Team members: Alparslan Ege Erdogan, Joshua Hill, Kailey Gotfried, Aditi Agrawal, Lucas Bauckman
- Advisor: Zhaodan Kong
UC Santa Cruz: UC Airlink Santa Cruz
- Award: Jeppesen ForeFlight Award for Excellence in Flight Planning & Operations: $3,000
- Team members: Eddie Ramos, Deeptesh Day, Nataniel Jayaseelan, Reva Agarwal, Neha Hingorani, Eric Vin, Jonathan Morris, Akshitha Nagaraj
- Advisors: Javier González-Rocha, Daniel Fremont
UC Davis: Davis Airlink eVolve
- Award: DART Community Integration Award: $2,000
- Team members: Connor Trieu, Nils Fleig, Joey Lee, Miumiu Zou, Ryan Sieh
- Advisor: Nathan Sedlander
UC Davis: Dare to Ascend Vertically Into the Sky (DAVIS)
- Award: CITRIS Aviation Excellence Award: $1,500
- Team members: Jesse Sandoz, Benjamin Brundage, Luis Gomez, Theresa Dinh, Parker McMillan, Adrian Munoz, Stephie Soloarivony, Abigail Zheng
- Advisors: Camli Badrya, Cibin Joseph
“Transforming aviation requires more than advances in aircraft technology. It requires developing the next generation of innovators,” Director of CITRIS Aviation, Ricardo Sanfelice said. “We are not only advancing new ideas for California Airlink and the broader AAM ecosystem, but also cultivating the workforce and leadership needed to shape the future of aviation for decades to come.”
Starting from scratch
Davis Vision to Mission got its name from its beginnings: team leader, Alparslan Ege Erdogan, says DVTM started as nothing more than a shared vision.
Erdogan heard about the challenge from last year’s winners at UC Davis. This year, he decided to participate when his advisor, Zhaodan Kong, Associate Director of CITRIS at UC Davis, recommended he give it a try. From there, Erdogan built a team from the ground up, prioritizing quality over quantity, seeking a small group of members with high standards of work.
“We started from zero and came up to the point that we were actually able to create software for a problem that we didn’t even know existed,” said Erdogan. “We needed to learn the solutions, and we needed to learn the problem. We did a lot of problem analysis.”
The final product, AURORA-i, is a decision-support platform for designing the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) network, which connects the CITRIS campuses and select airports. It helps with vertiport location selection, simulation, environmental and economic impact analysis and planning.
Using AI-powered analysis capabilities, AURORA-i recommends optimizations and calculates outcomes. “You either get replaced by AI or make AI,” said Erdogan.
“This is going to be happening soon, UAM is going to take over the normal modes of transportation,” Erdogan said. “The software that we created is implementable, usable and industry-ready.”
Tackling complexities
Reva Agarwal, who studies computer science at UC Santa Cruz, discovered the CITRIS Aviation competition while casually scrolling through the CITRIS website, and was connected with a team after reaching out to organizers – which turned out to be a perfect fit.
“I really enjoyed working with my team,” Agarwal said. “We all took a subsection of the report on the project and really dived deep. It was really comprehensive, really great work.”
The team, UC Airlink Santa Cruz, addressed several aspects of the challenge, focusing on economic, environmental and placement considerations, and ultimately creating a web app demo showing sustainability findings, altitude profiles and flight maps.
Agarwal also received a CITRIS scholarship to attend the 2026 Lift Summit, hosted by DART.
“CITRIS has been super supportive and kind,” Agarwal said. She especially appreciated the monthly feedback meetings throughout the process, because they helped solidify the project’s direction.
The experience taught Agarwal that nothing is out of reach, and even the experts started somewhere. Now, she feels like she can take on any challenge, no matter how intimidating.
“If I spend time learning about it, I don’t have to be so intimidated by these really complex new things that haven’t been figured out or are still being figured out,” Agarwal said.
‘Ragtag’ group of friends writes 70,000 lines of code
UC Davis team Airlink eVolve’s simulation architecture uses a whopping 70,000 lines of code, nine simulation components and 16 evaluation rubric metrics. It all started when a group of friends, who created an autonomous robotics club last fall, opted into the aviation competition after meeting with Sam King, the director of CITRIS at UC Davis.
The aviation challenge was somewhat of a last-minute undertaking for the group. “We figured, we’ll try our best and just check it out and see how it goes,” said group member Nils Fleig. “We were a bit more on the ragtag group kind of side of things. I think a lot of other teams were kind of seasoned researchers from research labs, which was really cool to see.”
In the past, Fleig worked as a software engineer intern at OrgOrg, an online platform that organizes productivity tools, such as syncing and integrating spreadsheets from Google, messages from Slack, and pay information on Gusto. He also founded MCMetrics, an analytics server for Minecraft, and won a $7,500 award for it at a UC Davis startup competition last year.
Following his experience in the startup world, the aviation competition felt like a breath of fresh air. Fleig enjoyed the opportunity to freely explore research and academia. Over the almost year-long process, his team had the space to experiment and be creative. Week after week, his group, comprising an array of majors and backgrounds, casually met up to work on its project.
“The idea of giving these six teams a year to just kind of go ham and see what they can do with this proposal is really cool, honestly, and brings out a lot of creativity,” Fleig said.
Humans take the cake
Dare to Ascend Vertically Into the Sky (DAVIS) created a simulation that connects a chain of decisions: where to fly, where to land, what risks to avoid and costs to consider. It answers these questions by providing information about weather, noise, population density and protected areas. Using this data, users can plan routes for eVTOL flights.
Team member Jesse Sandoz heard about the aviation project from Camli Badrya, who runs the lab where he volunteers and later advised his group.
“I took on the project because of CITRIS’s values, which prioritize innovation for the benefit of all of society,” Sandoz said. “Particularly with eVTOLs, there’s a significant risk of these technologies serving only a small population without consideration of the broader communities affected by them.”
To minimize negative impacts on citizens and animals below, part of this year’s evaluation criteria involved sustainability and environmental integration. This includes an awareness of weather, noise, wildlife and other potentially disruptive environmental factors. Sandoz’s team addressed these by consulting experts in other disciplines – for example, they spoke with wildlife conservation majors to identify bird migration risks.
The team also considered employing AI in the deployment of eVTOLs, but unlike other teams, they found human engineers superior.
“While there may be a need to employ some form of Artificial Intelligence in the deployment of eVTOLs, we found that everything that can be done by a human engineer is better in the end,” Sandoz said.
Sandoz found CITRIS, sponsors and NASA Ames to be “incredibly gracious, thoughtful, and engaged throughout the competition.”
“It felt great,” Sandoz said. “I am very proud of the work we did.”
Closing the gap
At the closing awards ceremony in Silicon Valley, the room was filled with joy, hope, excitement and anticipation. Students’ eyes lit up as they stepped up to the podium to receive their awards.
According to Leighton Quon from NASA Ames, the competition fills a critical gap in today’s aviation: society has planes for long distances, and cars for medium and short distances, but eVTOLs have the potential to reduce traffic by adding a new mode of transit.
“This is filling an area that has not been addressed,” Quon said. “The ability to move a lot of people more quickly, rather than having them trapped on the roadways and in terrible traffic, gives yet another option, which basically is adding new transportation capabilities for the metropolitan areas and for any area that you utilize it.”
What’s next for the young aviation experts is unknown, but one thing is for certain: they have helped lay the foundation for future pioneers.
“It’s always gratifying to see different viewpoints of a problem…regardless of what the problem is,” Quon said.