I remember when I worked for the American Dental Association.
So I remember telling people Oh to design a material to to survive the oral
environment is so challenging, it's really tough.
There's abrasion, prescription medication, you have ice cream, piping hot coffee 100
degrees or more. Every 45 minutes we've got solar radiation, x-rays, thermal
cycling, atomic oxygen, the UV radiation and the harsh vacuum of space.
And then I went to work for NASA. And people ask me what I do and I say oh it's so challenging.
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Much of my job is failure analysis when this material fails in
orbit like the outside of the blanket.
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It's basically being a detective. Oh my gosh how the heck are we gonna know what
happened to this incredibly complicated instrument on this incredibly
complicated satellite, that's 250 miles in space going 18,000 miles an hour that
we're not gonna get to for two or three years. But you slowly pick away at the
problem, you got a lot of smart people who are going systematically checking
off the list what is credible and non credible.
I mean it's it's a puzzle, it's a riddle.
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I started focusing on science and math
in middle school and in in high school. I went to college and got a degree in
chemistry. The thrill of being able to you know, know have insight into what's
really going on at the at the molecular level. It's just really exciting for me.
Not just accepting that it happens, but digging into it,
figuring out why. My degree is in chemistry and I do a lot with chemistry,
with material science engineering, with physics, but more important than all of
those is English.
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So if you cannot communicate your needs, your opinions,
your engineering judgment, little else matters.
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Engineering, chemistry, they all share the common goal of making sense being able to draw general
conclusions from a host of individual examples. So you can then use that information in the future.
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