Recognizing a Career of Exceptional Technical Achievement

I think it's the challenge of problem solving combined with advanced technology, innovative approaches
and an impact that would make a difference at the end of the day.

I interviewed at the University of Chicago for the job at MITRE, which was listed as a systems analyst, and I went to the interview because I was curious about what a systems analyst was. Walter Yondorf was a tech director here at MITRE at the time. His PhD was from the University of Chicago, and hence the connection with Chicago and MITRE. I found the interview very interesting and apparently MITRE found me interesting. And so I'm still here.

What was it that made me say no, MITRE was the place for me? First is the value MITRE puts on independence of our technical assessments. The second is that you're always looking for changes. And what I found was I could find that change within MITRE and didn't need to leave. I've had at least six different careers. I came here to work for when the company had a civil side called METREK, doing kind of large scale criminal justice research for the Department of Justice, career criminal, operation, hardcore program evaluations of how can we make changes and effect outcomes that we're looking for. That led to a variety of other opportunities, which led to system of systems for operational systems and now mission engineering.

You had technical partners within the company that provided you the vehicle to take on those challenges and take on a whole new approach to things. Most recently with System of Systems, mission engineering work, our AI work to provide artificial intelligence to support the conduct of mission engineering and enable mission engineering has opened up all sorts of possibilities. The advanced architectures through NVIDIA and Omniverse allow you to then bring those simulations to systems engineering, which could actually revolutionize the way we do systems engineering as well.

One of the most important activities in my career was a time when I was on loan as a detailee to the Department of Defense. It put me in a situation where I had to sit across the table from MITRE as a sponsor and understand what it meant to be the person who had to sign on the line and bring together industry, academia, other government organizations and our international partners to develop an international standard. And it left me with a huge amount of appreciation and respect for the views that come from those other organizations.

Technical leadership really requires you to take that broad view, factor the context, and integrate multiple views as you go forward.

I hope I do that in every team. When you pull a team together, you bring people in with the kinds of skills that are going to be needed to tackle the problem. But in a team environment where you're actually doing is creating that environment that the team can work together and actually do more than any one of us could have done alone.

The capabilities that early careers are bringing to this company are things that I would never have imagined when I came here a million years ago and having teams that have folks that take that approach makes every day really fun to work, and what keeps me engaged.