Duke Bristow Jr and Wellington Bristow.
There’s a moment at commencement, just before your name is called, when the tassel hasn’t shifted yet and the rest of your life is already waiting. This May, two brothers will have that moment — separately, on the same stage, on the same day.
This year, the Bristow family is making history of its own. Duke Bristow Jr., 23, is finishing his master’s in aerospace engineering. Wellington Bristow, his younger brother by a year, is receiving his bachelor’s — also in aerospace — before beginning a PhD in USC’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME) at USC Viterbi in the fall. Their sister Erin already has a computer science degree from USC. Four engineers, one family.
Born Into It
It didn’t happen by accident. Duke and Wellington grew up with an engineer for a father — Duke Bristow Sr., now an Associate Professor of Clinical Finance and Business Economics at USC’s Marshall School of Business, who still invokes his Purdue engineering degree from 1979 like a credential and a creed. Whenever he solved a problem around the house, the kids knew what was coming: “Purdue Engineering, 1979.” The message was never subtle. An engineering degree, he told them, would serve them well no matter where life took them. His own career — from chemical engineer to finance professor — made the case better than any lecture could.
“It wasn’t forced on me,” Wellington says of his path to engineering. “I just always really enjoyed the sort of physics and math problems that came with it.” He attended a STEM magnet in middle and high school, accumulating five years of engineering coursework before he ever set foot on a college campus. But the moment that really set him on his trajectory came in a high school physics class, when his teacher couldn’t resist going off-script. The lesson wasn’t on the AP test. It wasn’t required. The teacher just had to show them the Newtonian differential equation for drag on a free-falling body — and something clicked.
“I realized, wow, I just don’t know hardly anything, and there’s so much left to learn,” Wellington says. He wrote his PhD application essay about that moment. He’s about to spend the next several years of his life chasing the feeling it gave him.
Duke’s interest in engineering started from a young age. Growing up he would fall asleep watching World War II documentaries about tanks and planes. These documentaries led him towards a deep interest in engineering and defense. “I was always pretty good at math and science,” he says, “so that kind of geared me toward engineering.” He thought about a PhD. He thought about it seriously. But an internship after his junior year put him in a room where classroom theory became working hardware, and by the time senior year arrived, his mind was made up: he wanted the real thing.
The Only School They Really Wanted
The brothers landed at USC for overlapping reasons. Their father’s connection to the university made tuition possible, but they would have wanted to go anyway. Duke grew up going to football games on campus, eating in the dining halls, wandering the quad. “I kind of grew up on the campus,” he says. “It was kind of the only school I really wanted to go to.” Wellington puts it more simply: “Something about this campus, the brick, the lights at night; going to USC was just a dream come true.”
Both landed in aerospace, a department that, despite being housed within one of the country’s leading engineering schools, runs with the intimacy of a small program. Duke’s graduating class numbered around 60 students. Everyone knew everyone. “It was very much a ‘let’s all do good together’ kind of environment,” he says. “We all wanted to see each other succeed.”
The class that both brothers cite as formative — unprompted, as if reading from the same script — is Mechoptronics (AME 341), a notoriously challenging two-semester lab course. Wellington eventually became a course producer for it, essentially a TA, and revisited the material with fresh eyes. “I hate to say it, because the class was really frustrating to take,” he admits, “but it prepares you for failure, for debugging, for writing technical reports, for collecting and processing data. It’s a run-through of what your life’s gonna be like as an engineer, no matter what you get into.” Duke ended up TAing it and working in the lab where it was held. Two brothers, same class, same conclusion.
Two Paths, One Graduation Day
After graduation, their paths diverge sharply, by design. Duke has been working since July 2025 at L3 Harris, a defense contractor outside Dallas, where he does structural engineering on the RC-135 aircraft. He completed his master’s remotely through USC’s DEN program while working full-time, watching recorded lectures in the evenings and on weekends. The arrangement worked well. “It pretty much felt like I was in school,” he says. “Everything was normal, except I’m watching the lectures on my computer.” He’s already thinking about asking his manager for the raise that typically comes with a master’s degree.
Longer term, Duke wants to stay in aerospace, with an eye on the space sector. He sees himself eventually making his way back to Southern California, where his family still is. And someday, maybe, teaching. “It’d be kind of cool to come back and teach as an adjunct,” he says. “If they’d have me.”
He’s made peace with Texas for now, though not with everything about it. Ask him about Tex-Mex versus California Mexican food and he doesn’t hesitate. “California’s way better tacos. California is hard to beat.”
Wellington is staying at USC, but moving deeper in. Since October 2024, he’s been working in the Combustion and Fuels Research Laboratory under Professor Fokion Egolfopoulos, studying flame instabilities in hydrogen-air mixtures. Hydrogen burns differently than conventional fuels — differently enough that it introduces instabilities not yet fully understood. His work began under the Undergraduate Research Associates Program at USC during the summer of 2025 and continued with a senior project group in AME 441a during the fall. The research aims to close that gap in knowledge and has involved intercollegiate collaboration with a group at the University of Connecticut, with its applications stretching across the transportation, energy, and propulsion systems. He’s already co-authored a paper which he will present at the International Combustion Symposium in Kyoto this July.
The PhD, for Wellington, was always the plan. He wants to become a professor. He sees the research and the teaching as inseparable. “Getting a PhD, there’s no better way to deeply understand the physical world,” he says. “It all just aligns.” He describes joining the lab full-time as something like receiving a job offer where you already know your boss, already know your colleagues, and already love the work. “I couldn’t be more ready.”
At home, the Bristow household doesn’t turn every dinner into an engineering seminar. When the whole family is together, conversation drifts toward sports and everything else. But one-on-one, Duke Sr. still loves to dig in — especially with Wellington, whose combustion research sits close enough to his chemical engineering roots that he can ask real questions and be genuinely surprised by the answers.
Four engineers, one family. One campus, one graduation day, two sons crossing the stage. “Fight on,” as they say at USC — and in the Bristow household, apparently, they mean it.
Published on May 1st, 2026
Last updated on May 1st, 2026