What do you like best about being an engineer?

Question

What do you like best about being an engineer?

I find the most exciting part of my work is having experiments that are flown in space! I find it really exciting (and cool ;) to have my experiments taken up into space by astronauts on the space shuttle, and for the MISSE experiments, to have them placed outside of the International Space Station by an astronaut during a space-walk. Then after a year or more, an astronaut does another spacewalk to bring the experiment back to Earth, and I get to test my samples and see how my experiment did in space. I get to work closely with other researchers (from Glenn, other NASA centers, universities and/or industry) on my projects and flight experiments. I really enjoy working with others as I am constantly learning from them, and it is usually a lot of fun to team up and work together. It is both the interesting people I meet and the fascinating projects that make me love my work at NASA. Another part I really enjoy about being a research engineer is that I write the results of my space and laboratory experiments in papers and present the results to other space experts at national or international conferences. I have given papers at conferences around the United States (including Hawaii), and internationally such as in Canada, the Netherlands and France. In March 2008, I was invited by the Japanese Aerospace Agency to give an invited keynote presentation at a conference in Japan!

Another wonderful thing about my work at NASA is that since 1998 I have been collaborating with (conduct research with) high school girls. We have a special program where we work on an on-going basis with students from Hathaway Brown School, an all-girls high school. The students work with me and my colleague, Bruce Banks, on a number of our flight experiments. These collaborative experiments are a series of experiments called PEACE for the “Polymer Erosion and Contamination Experiment”. The girls join the “PEACE Team” as freshmen or sophomores in high school and work with me throughout their high school career! You can read an article “High School Students Team with NASA on Space Experiments” about our collaboration at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/MISSE_PEACE_Feature.html. There is a second article entitled “The Wait is Over: Space Station Project Returns” at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/MISSE_returnstoGlenn_120505.html. Often the students enter their NASA research in national and international science fairs. As an example, 3 PEACE team students entered and won the Midwest Regional Competition of the 2006-07 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. The students then went on to win 6^th place in the National Finals. As Siemens National Finalists, the students won over $20,000 in scholarships and awards! You can read an article about the competition entitled “Students Win Siemens Award for Space Station Experiment” at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/siemens_award.html. Also, in May 2008, two other PEACE team students presented a research paper (an oral presentation) at an international conference in Toronto, Canada! They were only sophomores in high school! In addition to working with the high school girls, I have also mentored numerous university students during my NASA career (over 30 students so far). Most of the students have worked with me for more than one summer. We work together on flight experiments and other research, such as Hubble Space Telescope insulation studies. I also participate in numerous outreach activities in an effort to get young girls interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, and to show them that women can, and are, very successful in STEM careers.