Tell me your history as an engineer.

I had my first teaching position at Michigan Tech and taught there for three years, but I’d always had a dream of working for NASA and being involved in some way. After my second year, I got a chance to do a summer faculty fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. I really wanted to impress them, and I was eventually [offered] a full-time job and moved my family all the way out to California. I spent 10 years at JPL and worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers all the way through design, development, assembly, testing, launch and operations. I was one of the first eight rover drivers, and we were the individuals responsible for navigating the rovers around the surface of Mars.