(Music)
Katharine Lee: One thing I've reflected on in my
career is as you progress, different things become
important to you.
When I was starting out, obviously, I was really
interested in being the lead of some project
or authoring a paper or you know, being seen
as the expert in some field.
I'm now more in the management side of things and
I think that the thing that most gratifies me is
being able to reward my employees or advocate for
them or make sure that they have what they need to
get the job done.
That's really unbelievably rewarding.
It's not the same impact as having a scientific
breakthrough, but it's very satisfying.
My name is Kathy Lee.
I'm the Deputy Division Chief for the
Aviation Systems Division.
And I work at NASA.
I do not actually remember the moon landing.
I don't remember watching it.
I was not quite 4 years old when that happened.
But I remember growing up, reading science fiction
and always thinking that space travel was going
to be a common thing in my future.
What I didn't know until, almost until I got here,
was that the first "A" of NASA is Aeronautics.
And so, NASA has a huge history in aeronautics
technology development and, so that was the part
of NASA that I got involved in.
Growing up, I thought I wanted to be a doctor
or scientist.
When I was in college, I did major in science,
but I also had a second major in psychology.
It wasn't necessarily clear to me, as an
undergraduate, that that could lead to
a career at NASA.
Which is pretty cool, if you think about it.
It's great that NASA, while it has some amazing
scientists and engineers, that it's not restricted
to those fields.
That there are fields like psychology that have
application to the work that we do here.
I really like my job.
I like the people that I work with.
I'm in a terrific organization that does
air traffic control automation research.
And it's something that is going
to improve air travel.
It's going to make it greener.
It's going to make it more efficient.
Reduce delays.
We recently transferred some technology to the FAA
and that was a great accomplishment after years of
really, really hard work by a lot of really smart,
extraordinary people.
Although I wasn't personally writing code or
running the experiments, I was trying to do my part
as a manager to make that happen
and I was really proud of that.
I know a lot of my peers, growing up,
there was still this difficulty for girls to be seen
equally to boys and to be given encouragement.
I guess I'm lucky that my parents
were never so inclined.
They encouraged my sister and me to work hard,
to study and I never was made to feel that,
being a girl, I couldn't accomplish something.
One piece of advice is "Anything worth doing,
is worth doing well."
I hope that my kids get that, that they should
work hard at whatever it is they're doing.
It doesn't matter if it's math or science.
It's great if it is!
But if it isn't, they can still contribute
to society by working really hard and
doing a great job.
I hope that the work that we're doing continues to
make a difference in aeronautics.
I think it will.
We are directly impacting the air transportation
system in a really positive way, so I think
that's all going to be really exciting.
We have a lot of really smart young people working
for us now and...we also have really smart older
people working for us!
But I'm looking forward to seeing this
next generation of employees sort of, come in
and take the reins and really push us
to the next frontier.
(Music)