William F. Spotz, Ph.D.

This exposure to the space program inspired me in 1985 to enter the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. During this period, I worked summers at IBM, and spent my final tour in the department that tests on-board space shuttle software. There, I helped develop a visualization tool for testing software control of the shuttle's reaction control system. At The University, Dr. Graham Carey took me under his wing and got me working in the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory where I started my study of High-Order Compact Finite Difference Methods. I now have a B.S., M.S., and as of 1995, a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, as well as a number of papers to my credit.

In 1996, I started work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where I was a Postoctoral Fellow in the Advanced Study Program. I am now a project scientist with the Computational Sciences Section of the Scientific Computing Division, developing numerical methods for global climate modeling and related phenomena.

In 1993, I married Katie Simons, also a U.T. Aerospace Engineering graduate, who (while we lived in Houston) worked for Rockwell Space Operations Company, designing shuttle flight plans for rendezvous missions. She designed shuttle trajectories for Spartan and Mir rendezvous missions and supported Mission Control for those missions, the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, as well as many others. She now works at Raytheon as a systems engineer setting up ground stations for international communications satellites.