Featured Biographies

Giol Vinyals-i-Roca

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Giol Vinyals-i-Roca is an Aerospace Engineering student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University specializing in Astronautics and UAS Applications. A 4.0 GPA Honors student and recipient of both the VFS and ERAU Excellence scholarships, Giol currently serves as the Design Lead for the GoAero competition team at the EFRC, having progressed through propulsion, avionics, and manufacturing roles that earned a U.S. Innovation Award. He is also the founder and Principal Investigator of the NAUT project, focusing on underactuated nano-aircraft technology. With over eight years of experience building and flying FPV drones, Giol balances his technical research with being a classically trained violist and a competitive judoka. An avid endurance athlete and scuba diver, he has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and completed both a solo Ironman and a 75km ultramarathon. Driven by his goal of becoming an astronaut, Giol aims to advance space technologies that expand exploration capabilities and deliver meaningful benefits on Earth.