Adam Steltzner

After flunking high school math, Adam more or less dropped out.  He played bass and drums in new wave bands, and studied jazz at Berklee but dropped out of there, too.  He became a gigging musician, but had an epiphany in 1984 while driving home: he fell in love with the stars in the night sky.  So he dropped back in to school, earning a B.S. in mechanical engineering, a masters in applied mechanics from Cal Tech, and a PhD in engineering mechanics from UW at Madison.  He's now an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he led the design of the Mars Curiosity "sky hook" landing system.  (Spoiler alert?  It WORKED.)

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