Profile

These days I’m based in Limerick, Ireland, where I was born.   But I spend a lot of my time in Washington DC (where I also have a house), as I spent 15 years working for NASA as Director of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory.

I was hired by NASA because of my expertise in the area of mathematical correctness of software.  That is, showing that software will work the way we want it to.  For space exploration this is really important, and most missions are planned for 20-30 years before launch and the software is only written at the end.   We need to know that the software will do what it’s supposed to and often we can’t really test it fully beforehand.  The software is just too big and too complex and until the hardware is actually in use, we can’t really test it.   So we use mathematics to prove that the software will work and if there’s a problem that we will be able to recover from it.   It doesn’t guarantee that we won’t have problems.  But it really reduces the likelihood.

We’ve applied these techniques to a number of NASA missions, including the famous Rovers and the James Webb Space Telescope and the new Artemis mission.   We also used these techniques in the servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope.

I don’t really have a typical day.   Some days I start very early to talk with other people in other countries.   So for example, I give a lot of talks in India and 9am their time is 3:30am here.    I try to push them to start a bit later but that’s not always possible.    Other days i have evening meetings/conference calls with people in the US.   It means that the day can be long, but I usually have plenty of breaks and some free time in-between.

Since Covid, things are very different.  But previously I used to travel a lot.   I usually average about 200 flights per year.   So that’s a lot of fun and I get to visit a lot of places I wouldn’t otherwise get to.

I teach classes and I give a lot of talks to conferences and universities abroad.

I am Director-elect of IEEE (Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), which is the largest professional society in the world (almost 500,000 members).  In 2025 and 2026 I will be in charge of all its activities in Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

I would help some aspiring engineers to attend an IEEE Student and Young Professionals event.