Audrey Pool O'Neal was just 14 when she built a truss out of balsa wood that held 80 pounds of bricks. Her I-beam design "wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing—the others were much prettier," she admits, "but my truss held the most bricks." As a result, she won first prize for her project in a Purdue University program for promising high school students. The rest—her college degree, a job at General Motors, a PhD in engineering at UCLA, and her work in a program much like the one in which she excelled—all of that became more or less inevitable.

Audrey went home to Inkster, Michigan, knowing what she wanted to be when she grew up. "The only thing that wavered was what kind of engineer I would be," she says. Ironically, perhaps, it was a teacher of English rather than science or mathematics who set Audrey on her course. Deciding that Audrey "should be an engineer," Martha Petroski not only arranged the Purdue opportunity but two summers later sent Audrey off to the University of Wisconsin for a similar but more intensive and longer program.

Audrey turned down a subsequent scholarship from Wisconsin to accept an offer from the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), a small private college that provided plenty of face time with professors and was less than two hours from home. For five years, Audrey studied mechanical engineering for 12 weeks, then worked 12 weeks in GM’s Powertrain division, which designs and manufactures engines and automatic transmissions for all GM products. Her thesis involved a simplified process for welding high carbon steel directly with low carbon steel to make a material that was both hard and flexible.

Where she grew up, just about everyone worked for one of the automakers. "Many, many family members [including her father] worked for Ford," she says, "so I was going to be the rebel and go to GM." Her father had his revenge, however. "To make sure I didn’t forget where I came from," she says, "when I graduated from high school, he bought me a brand new Ford, which I had to drive to the GM lot every day."

After she got her bachelor's degree, Audrey continued working at GM for more than a decade. In 1996, GM sent Audrey to UCLA for a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in fluid mechanics, preparing her to work on "the engine side" of its operations. Audrey didn’t go back, however, but stayed on for doctoral studies.

In the next few months, she'll receive her PhD in mechanical engineering. Working in the Multifunctional Composites Lab, Audrey has developed a way to embed a nanocomposite barium titanate into the materials used to build machines that need capacitors to store and then release power. Barium titanate is a dielectric ceramic material, which does not conduct electricity but has the ability to support an electrostatic field while dissipating minimal energy in the form of heat. Structures built using her material won't need separate capacitors—"You could save the weight and embed that functionality into the skin of an aircraft, for example," she explains.

Engineering may be her oldest love. "I always liked taking things apart and putting them back together, even before I realized there was a field of engineering," she says. "Sometimes I'd get it right and sometimes not exactly."

Her newest love is teaching. There’s "that light bulb moment," she says, "when you look at the face of a student and see that they get it. There's something about that I enjoy too much"—at least too much to go back to GM or any job in industry. Instead, she'd "like to help students become engineers." While she finishes her dissertation work, she's been getting some practice in that arena at UCLA's Center for Excellence in Engineering and Diversity (CEED), which offers a variety of pre-college programs to orient K-12 students toward engineering and computing, as well as undergraduate programs and services focused on the personal, academic, and career development of economically disadvantaged and underrepresented Engineering and Computer Science students at UCLA.

To start, Audrey was a volunteer facilitator for a workshop supporting underrepresented students entering mechanical engineering's core courses. Then, she was a paid instructor for the Introduction to Engineering Disciplines course, adding a research module to the requirement for entering freshmen. That success led directly to her current position as the Associate Director of CEED. In this role, one of her main responsibilities is coordinating a new summer program, Research Intensive Series in Engineering for Underrepresented Populations (RISE-UP). As Audrey describes her work, she "puts undergraduate students at UCLA in research, I mentor their projects as they go along, and then I have them do a poster presentation at the end of the year."

Rick Ainsworth, the Center's director, says, Audrey's "overall effort (volunteer or compensated) has made outstanding contributions to and positive changes in the engineering teaching and learning culture and, in particular, for the development and success for underrepresented engineering students." RISE-UP's success "not only produced increased diversity in the engineering research labs, but also faculty requested more CEED students," he adds.

Apparently, everyone is learning the lesson that Audrey picked up some time ago. "Engineering in general isn't necessarily a welcoming environment for women or people who are different," she says. "But when you do well, people just come around. All of a sudden, your gender is unimportant, your race is unimportant. You’re the engineer who can do this or solve that problem." She points out that she was also younger than the other students attending the Purdue University program, but her age didn't matter: "My truss held the most bricks."

Published in Spring 2007, Graduate Quarterly