I am a project team manager with The MITRE Corporation's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD). CAASD is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) that works with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other civil aviation authorities. I have been with MITRE since 2001, originally hired as a Simulation Modeling Engineer.

My department focuses on airspace and airport analysis. We solve problems on many levels—taxiing and runway issues at an airport level, arrival and departure issues at a terminal level (within 40 miles of a major airport), and en route issues at regional and national levels. The majority of this work has been executed in conjunction with the National Airspace Redesign, an FAA effort to implement changes in a collaborative manner.

My department is quite diverse—we've got mathematicians, nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, computer scientists, various flavors of engineers, pilots, and air traffic controllers. Many cultures are represented, and over one-third of the department is female.

Although the technical work (and definitely the management work!) is not that mathematically rigorous, I do find it to be very challenging. We have a large suite of tools, and one way that I have contributed to the work program in a unique fashion has been crafting various preprocessors and postprocessors so that input and output streams between the various tools can communicate effectively.

Occasionally I do use my mathematical expertise.