When I was in junior high school, I was fascinated with movies, music and television. I did not want to be an actress, musician or news reporter, so I decided that I wanted to work behind the scenes in television, not in front of the cameras. I went to the library to learn more about careers in television and found out there is a person who works at each television station called the Broadcast Engineer. While I was still in high school, I volunteered to work at several local television stations in order to learn more about television careers and in particular, Broadcast Engineers. After working at the television stations, I learned how to operate the cameras, write "storyboards" and edit film. The work was fun, but because I wanted to learn more about how the television equipment was designed, I realized that I needed to know more about electronics.

During my junior and senior years in high school, I participated in the Explorer Program at NASA Langley. Explorer is a special program of the Boy Scouts of America for both boys and girls who are in 8th-12th grade. I was in the Electronics Explorer Post at NASA Langley, in which we learned how to design and build electronic devices. My favorite part of Explorer was learning about digital logic, which uses a type of mathematics called Boolean algebra. One of the projects that my Explorer troop designed was a smoke detector with warning lights for a Deaf person. At that time, I wanted to major in Broadcasting or Mass Media, but my Explorer troop leader convinced me to major in Electrical Engineering instead.

I entered Hampton University as an Applied Physics/Engineering Electronics major. However, at the beginning of my second year of college, I discovered that I enjoyed my math, logic and computer science courses much more than my physics courses, so I changed my major to Mathematics. About one year later, I read an article in national magazine about an engineer at NASA Langley who also majored in math as an undergraduate, but continued her education and earned a graduate degree in engineering. Based on that article, I decided that I could continue majoring in math and learn more about computer science and engineering in graduate school.

The summer after I completed my B.A. degree at Hampton University, but before I entered the University of Virginia, I was a LARSS student at NASA Langley. LARSS is short for Langley Research Center Summer Scholar. It is a 10-week summer program for undergraduate juniors and seniors and first year graduate students. Growing up, I was never interested in airplanes or space, so I didn't think that I would want to work at NASA. My LARSS work experience changed my mind. My LARSS work assignment was in the area of computer vision algorithms for telerobotic systems. It was just as much fun as working at the television stations but even better. I could still use my math skills to create computer vision formulas and my logic skills to create computer programs that operated the robots.

I graduated from the University of Virginia with a Masters of Engineering degree in Systems Engineering. Immediately after graduation, I began working at NASA Langley. My research area at that time was computer and robot vision, which involved using math and computers to give robots the ability to "see". In my Systems Engineering curriculum at the University of Virginia, I took courses in systems analysis, operations research, computer modeling, artificial intelligence and statistics. I used what I learned in these courses to design robotic experiments and to modify robot vision algorithms. I led and completed a study of robot wrist camera, target and lighting configurations for remote control robotic (telerobotic) tasks.

My current research task is program (or portfolio) assessment of aviation safety technologies. The purpose of "program assessment" is to predict the impact of NASA's technologies on the aviation system of the future. Some of the factors used to measure this impact are fatal accident rate, technical development risk, implementation risk, cost and projected impact on safety risk. In program assessment, we use statistics, probability, systems analysis methods and computer programs to predict whether NASA's technologies will reduce the number of airplane accidents in the future. We look at accident data that we get from the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) to count how many times a particular type of accident happens. We are using the FAA and NTSB data along with estimates from aviation experts to try to determine the probability of a particular type of accident happening in the future.

From 2001-2004, I served as Level 3 Manager for Program Assessment in the Aviation Safety Program. As project manager, I led a team of researchers in the evaluation of the goals and technologies of the NASA Aviation Safety Program. I have also represented NASA on a team that was responsible for measuring the impact of changes recommended by the government, aircraft manufacturers, airlines and others on safety in the entire NAS.

Program and technical portfolio assessment is important because there are too many aviation problems for NASA to try to solve them all at the same time and we have a limited amount of resources (employee and money). Therefore, the aviation program and project managers use the reports that are written by me and the other analysts to decide which aviation problems are most important for NASA to solve.

It may seem strange to switch from computer and robot vision to aviation systems analysis, but there are actually many similarities between these two areas. Both require a good background in math, especially statistics and operations research, computer programming, logic and systems analysis. This is why I believe Systems Engineering is a great college major because it combines all of these areas into one field and the skills can be used to solve many types of problems.

I am married with two small children. The four of us enjoy attending concerts, watching movies and traveling. In my spare time, I like to solve logic and jigsaw puzzles and play tennis, trivia and board games with my family and friends.

FEBRUARY 2006