U of A Students to Host Virtual Panel Discussion With SpaceX and Boeing Engineers

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The University of Arkansas student chapter of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Women in Engineering invites the community to join them for a virtual panel of five engineers from SpaceX and Boeing as they share their experiences in the workforce.

The panel will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m. Central Time.

The panelists will be Kaleigh Gerlich, Ruthie Gilman and Amanda Quan from Boeing and Liz Held and Zan Song from SpaceX. They'll be talking about their experience in the aerospace industry, diversity in the work environment and more.

Allison Rucker, an electrical engineering student and member of WIE, said all majors are invited to join especially those in industrial, electrical, aerospace, mathematics, and engineering sciences.

"We're excited to host this panel discussion," she said. "Aerospace is important because many advancements that have been made go beyond the what many people would think. Recent advances in things like solar panels and firefighter gear all have roots in the aerospace industry."

Rucker and her team hope students will be able apply tips from the panelists to their own lives.

"We want this event to make an impact," she said. "We feel lucky to get the opportunity to hear from these five engineers and hope the UA community will join us."

The panel will be held on Blackboard. To join, click here: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/e47d7e2577c14b81b4f5a4e71742e9a3

About the Panelists:

Kaleigh Gerlich

Kaleigh Gerlich is a Technical Lead Engineer at Boeing in Seattle. She has experience working on both commercial and military derivative airplanes and has a broad technical background including propulsion, fuel systems, aerodynamics, test, and systems engineering. Gerlich has a master's in aerospace engineering from the University of Washington and a dual Bachelors in Aeronautical & Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Outside of work, Gerlich enjoys running, reading, baking, sailing, and volunteering in her community.

Ruthie Gilman

Ruthie Gilman graduated with her B.S.E.E. from Seattle University in 2004. She works for Boeing Commercial Airplanes as a senior lead for 777X Electrical Design. Over her 15 years-plus experience she has worked on other commercial aircraft like the 787, consulted on electrical designs for multiple commercial and military vehicles and helped develop new processes and tools for designing the integrated wiring for aircraft. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, traveling, playing video games, volunteering with local German Shepherds rescues and reading.

Liz Held

Held graduated with a bachelor's in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in December 2017. At Purdue, she was an engineering co-op at General Motors and did a couple of internships at Tesla at the Fremont, California, factory. She went straight to SpaceX after graduating and worked as a technical writer for two years. She wrote the manufacturing instructions for machining, inspecting, and spin forming metallic nozzles and domes for Falcon structures, Merlin engines, and Dragon subtanks.

Held then moved on to become a manufacturing engineer, responsible for building ground station antennas that connect SpaceX Starlink satellites to the fiber internet backhaul. She designed the production system, owned the build process, designed tools, and ran the electro-mechanical troubleshooting for the antennas. Held applied techniques such as design-for-manufacturability and lean manufacturing to reduce labor hours to meet our production rate targets. The antenna builds moved to Starlink HQ in Seattle, so she moved on to be the manufacturing engineer for Falcon Vertical Barrel Integration, where they install hardware to segments of the Falcon rocket before welding them into each 1st and 2nd stage. Outside of work, most of her hobbies have been robbed by the pandemic but she has been getting by with watching movies, making cocktails, thrifting, reading by the pool, and trying new things.

Amanda Quan

Quan studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Seattle University and went on to pursue a master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Washington. She started work for Boeing in 2005, spending most of her time in Electrical Power testing with a short stint in the wind tunnels. Working through 787, 777X, and NMA programs, she has experience in leading design and test teams through systems integration and certification of the power system. Currently, she is working to expand her knowledge regarding Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and its applications to airplane design.

Zan Song

After graduating from Dartmouth College with a bachelor's degree in engineering sciences in May 2017, Song went straight to work for SpaceX. In her first role, she was a Falcon build reliability engineer, and she owned a final technical review of all build instructions and product deviations of high-risk subassemblies. Song drove reduction of defect rates, escapes and issue labor. I also evaluated risk, drove rework for fleet-wide containments and defined the containment risk analysis process. Fun fact, she has resolved the highest number of product deviations of all engineers in company history.

In early 2020, Song moved to work for the program management team of Starship as an integration and test engineer. In her new role, she establishes and stabilizes new processes for critical path projects outside the scope of defined engineering teams in analysis, integration, test and program management. She also identifies long-term process owners and ensures the allocation of resources for the transition to steady-state. Outside of work, Song loves to hike, climb, rollerblade, and camp.