Matt Spence:  

ork interconnecting scientists with places like the South Pole, mountaintop observatories, and pretty much anywhere else NASA did science. After a couple of years of this, I became an applications engineer for the NASA Research & Education Network, in which I would work directly with scientists, researchers, and end sites to coordinate multisite demonstrations of applications under development. I would also do various forms of systems performance testing and optimization, and I built several network tools when I couldn't find or afford existing things that did what I needed to do. About every six months we'd do something that had never been done before. One of the projects that I had worked with at NREN decided they liked me enough to fund me to work directly for them half-time as a network, systems, and security architect. A year later they funded me full-time and I moved from NREN into the Ames Computational Sciences division, where I currently sit. These days I am involved with setting up an integrated system health management (ie experimental diagnostic avionics technologies) testbed. A couple of weeks ago our group got a tour of Mission Control in Houston, and we were able to ask the controllers and support people detailed questions.