Would-be rock star turned NASA engineer kicks off AIHce opening session
At 20, Adam Stelzner was an aspiring rock star; on his way home from a gig, he noticed that the constellation of Orion had shifted from where it was hours before. That’s all it took to spark his desire to know everything about the laws that govern the universe. This led him to return to school and earn a PhD; by the age of 35, he was an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories. He’s now Team Leader and Chief Engineer EDL, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory CuriosityRover Project. And he’s been honored with the Smithsonian’s American Ingenuity Award in technology to GQ magazine’s Spaceman of the Year.
On Monday morning at this year’s American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Expo, Stelzner kicks off the meeting with his talk, “The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership and High Stakes Innovation.”