I was born and raised just north of Boston Massachusetts, where I worked as a cook from age 15 until I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a BSME in 1994. My engineering career started at Parametric Technology Corporation, the company that publishes Creo (then Pro/ENGINEER) which is the CAD software that I still use today. I worked as a test engineer for the drawing programming group, where I put new software functionality through rigorous testing prior to release. I familiarized myself with Pro/ENGINEER in college, but at PTC I actually got to learn from the people that write the software. It was an amazing experience which turned out to be a pivotal cornerstone of my career that ended up opening the doors to many opportunities. In 1996 I moved to Atlanta, Georgia where I worked as a mechanical engineer for RELTEC Corporation in designing weather-proof enclosures for "last-mile" network access products for the telecom, fiber-optic and cable TV industries. In 1998, I moved to Houston, TX where I landed a position at NASAs Johnson Space Center as a mechanical design engineer and I've been enjoying working here ever since. I work at the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility where astronauts, cosmonauts and commercial crew train for space flight missions on full-scale, high-fidelity space vehicle mockups. The facility consists of the International Space Station, Orion, Gateway and Lunar Lander vehicles along with two partial-gravity simulators, an air-bearing floor, and various part-task and ECLSS rack trainers. The types of training conducted here includes emergency operations, on-orbit maintenance, photo and video, stowage and handling, airlock operations and scientific payload operations. As part of JSCs Flight Operations Directorate I've also been heavily involved in developing mockups and trainers for the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, which is one of the world’s largest indoor pools and can support multiple large scale operations for training astronaut EVA missions as well as commercial sea-rescue training. It's a great honor to be a part of the NASA community and it's been an amazing experience for which I will always be grateful, but it's time for me to seek a new opportunity in cooler climes.