Kathryn Turner...

Howdy! My name is Kathryn Turner. I'm a biomedical engineering major from League City, Texas, and most importantly, I'm the proudest member of the Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of 2005. WHOOP!

So how did I get into biomedical engineering, you ask? Well, when I was in high school, I loved biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science. So I wanted a career that would let me utilize all of these areas of knowledge, while allowing me to be creative, solve problems, and contribute to society. However, such a career was rather difficult to find, and I settled on a double major in mathematics and molecular and cell biology.

But one fateful day, I received a college course catalog in the mail. Now, such an event was by no means unusual, but I actually looked through this one instead of consigning it to the rubbish heap, and while flipping pages, I spotted the words "Biomedical Engineering."

"Dude, what's that all about?" I thought intelligently. I flipped back and read the degree description, and found that biomedical engineering was about applying the principles of engineering to problems in the human body.

WHOOP!!!

I only wish that, for the sake of poetic justice, the catalog in question had been an A&M catalog. Unfortunately, it wasn't, but I didn't take long to discover that A&M had an excellent biomedical engineering program, and I promptly enrolled.

As for my degree track, I eventually chose instrumentation, which was ironic given my preliminary dislike of PHYS 208, Electricity and Optics. (I couldn't understand it because there wasn't enough math. That'll teach me to listen to other people's professor recommendations.) Anyway, after I spent some time in an EE lab, I ended up really enjoying it, and I even chose to earn a minor in electrical engineering along with my instrumentation specialty. (Actually, the minor requires only one extra course. So it's not as impressive as it sounds. Oh well.)

So how did I get to JSC? Well, I had read too much science fiction and fantasy as a child, so I had always been plagued by a wild desire to explore and to do exciting, adventurous things. (What the "things" would be was conveniently left undetermined.) And I'd always thought space exploration was very important for many, many reasons. So after I chose my major and looked at my career options, I realized that there was a place for me in the space program, where I could contribute to exploration to my heart's content. I took my résumé to Bob Musgrove at our annual co-op fair, and, to my surprise, was rewarded with an interview. I didn't get hired on my first try since there are so few spots for biomedical engineers, but I kept pestering Bob with plaintive letters and updated transcripts, and finally, he hired me to begin work in Fall 2003.

I spent my first tour in EB3, the Hardware Development Branch of the biomedical engineering division. I worked on the Smart Healthcare Management System project, which is an effort to augment and update the Crew Healthcare System aboard the station. One aspect of Smart Healthcare is implementing wireless sensor networks through the station, because this will provide more comprehensive environmental and physiological data collection and will result in a much lower crew time overhead. So my job was to evaluate a number of commercial off-the-shelf wireless sensor networks to look at where the market was going, as compared to our in-house systems. I enjoyed it very much and learned a great deal.

I returned to EB3 for my second tour in Summer 2004. I worked with the Wireless Instrumentation Systems project, which has been tasked with a Return to Flight assignment to create a vehicle health monitoring system for the leading edges of the Orbiters' wings. Since STS-114 was, at that time, slated to launch in March 2005, and Atlantis has to be prepared to launch as a rescue vehicle, the project was working to get the flight hardware calibrated, qualified, verified, cleaned, and shipped in time for installation in both Orbiters. I learned about how to work with Quality, Bonded Storage, testing facilities, the calibration lab, and others, and how to work flight hardware through Task Performance Sheets. I also worked a lot of Discrepancy Reports and learned about writing dispositions. It was a very interesting summer, and I'll be so proud to see Discovery go up and to think that I contributed, even in such a small way, to Return to Flight.

(Update: As of March 2005, STS-114 is due to launch in May. This may change. Check NASA's launch page for the most recent schedule. Also, for more information, see NASA's Return to Flight page.)

For my third tour, or third and fourth tours depending on how you look at it, I returned to EB3, now renamed the Environmental and Health Monitoring Branch, for Spring and Summer 2005. I was assigned to the radiation group, which is currently developing an advanced radiation instrument. This instrument is intended to serve as an all-purpose radiation detector that could be used in any mission on any craft, manned or unmanned. My task is to develop the power supply board, which will convert noisy spacecraft power to clean ±5 and ±12 signals for the PC/104 computer on board the instrument.

As a side note, the advantage of having two tours back-to-back is that you get an opportunity to work on a long-term project. In this case, I will be designing my board from the ground up, building and testing a prototype, and finally building a printed circuit board. And this is a future flight instrument, which makes my project even cooler. I can't even begin to imagine how I'll feel the first time something I designed flies.

I very strongly recommend a cooperative education experience for any engineering major.

Feel free to contact me with any questions at kathryn_turner@neo.tamu.edu.