I am pleased to be named as one of this year’s Society of Women Engineer’s New Faces of Engineering. An amazing group of women, including Rachel Morford, Brianne Wilburne, Allison Tuff Mjoen, and Jennifer Vallero, are also recognized with this honor. Our engineering stories are included in the Winter 2013 issue of SWE Magazine (pages 16-21 below). Congratulations to Rachel Morford for being SWE’s nominee to the National Engineering Week Foundation. The Foundation’s Engineers Week New Faces of Engineering 2013 award winners are featured on the eweek.org website and in today’s issue of USA Today.

While working at Rockwell Collins as a systems engineer, I have come to appreciate the value of the top-down approach to design.  We are building very complex systems with large teams and it is impossible for any one person to know how every widget works and fits together.  Because of this complex interaction my first boss, Bill Piche, always reminds our team that “we are all systems engineers.”  When he said this he wanted to make sure that all of the software engineers, hardware engineers, and control law engineers considered how their changes impacted the rest of the avionics system, the airplane,…