Sparx Engineering is a unique collection of talented engineers that work together on complex projects including autonomous robotic systems, flight controls, and medical devices. I lead and manage the software and mechanical teams as well as various projects. I've served as both a technical and people leader in various roles throughout growth of the company. My role is a hybrid between hands-on development, project management, team management, customer interface, resource planning and business development. The breadth of industries served at Sparx is wide, giving me a unique and broad perspective on design and problem solving.

Served as the Orion GN&C Software Functional Manager and led the NASA Orion FSW team. While in this position I worked to constantly improve the software development process and developed tools to aid in early testing and development for future Orion missions. I worked with everything from algorithm development to real-time testing of the software via high-fidelity simulation models. The Orion GN&C flight software underwent the most intense development, verification, validation and integrated testing possible for a spacecraft.The Orion spacecraft flew a flawless entry test flight (EFT-1) in December of 2014. I used my experience with the EFT-1 software development process to help streamline development for future Orion missions, specifically the EM-1 mission. EM-1 is the next test flight for Orion that will take the spacecraft to the moon and back. I helped create a fully featured automated build and test tool that would fully compile, simulate, run unit tests, calculate metrics, and report status for each change made to the software. This type of automation dramatically sped up the development cycle and decreased manual build and test time.

Developed and led the Model Based Design (MBD) methodology for GN&C software development. At the time, MBD was and is still a fairly new approach to tacking large, complex engineering software projects. The complexities of the development tools, existing legacy simulations, auto-coding processes, target simulations, real-time operating systems and large group of developers kept this job very challenging and rewarding.

To pursue my dream of working at NASA, I switched industries from industrial gas to space technology just as the Orion contract was awarded. I was excited to work on the next large scale space exploration project and wanted to get in on the ground floor. My work at ARES fell in to two categories; developing Probabilistic Risk Assessment models for systems on the Space Station and developing the software development plan for the Orion Guidance Navigation and Control system.

At Air Liquide I was exposed to all facets of the business from the commercial side, engineering development, and plant engineering. Most of my time at Air Liquide was as the Plant Engineer for the Bayport facility, the largest Air Liquide facility in the US. The knowledge and experience that I gained at Air Liquide allowed me to quickly obtain my Professional Engineering (PE) License. Some of the projects that I worked on were designing a startup Air Separation unit in Arizona, optimizing cryogenic backup units across the Gulf Coast pipeline region, optimizing electrical and natural gas use based on market price, and integrating a huge Steam Methane Reformer (SMR) into an existing ASU and Cogeneration plant. Through my work on the cryogenic backup systems I received a patent related to monitoring and detecting cryogenic gas leaks at our automated backup plants.