Today we announced the College's strategic vision, and for our first podcast episode, we sat down with the new dean of engineering, Bobby Braun to talk about his background but also the first semester on the job here and what the future might look like for the college.
On CUE Podcast Transcript
"Failure was an option" - Ep. 1 - Bobby Braun
Announcer:
And now from the University of Colorado in Boulder, the College of Engineering and Applied Science presents: On CUE. Here’s your host, Phil Larson.
Phil Larson:
Hey everybody and welcome to the first episode of our CU engineering podcast. A goal with this is to talk about all of the exciting stuff going on both here and beyond the campus in the world of science, technology, engineering and math. And we want your input so make sure to send your ideas for who or what we should cover to cuengineering@colorado.edu.
For our first episode, I thought it would be appropriate to chat with the new dean here at CU, Bobby Braun.
I first met Bobby in 2010 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida we were both there for President Obama’s speech on the future of NASA and space policy. And then we got to work together for a few years implementing that policy in DC. At that point, Bobby was on leave from Georgia Tech and was serving as the first NASA Chief Technologist in over a decade. He’s had a pretty interesting career starting with helping land the first-ever Mars rover on the Red Planet 20 years ago. So, we sat down in his office around July 4th to talk about his background but also the first semester on the job here and what the future might look like for the college. So, I hope you enjoy it.
Larson:
All right so we’re sitting here with Bobby Braun who’s now been dean of engineering here at CU for a little over 6 months.
Bobby Braun:
Engineering and Applied Science.
Larson:
CU Engineering and Applied Science, College of, and you are dean of. How’s it going 6 months in?
Braun:
I think its going great, you should probably ask the faculty and the staff that.
Larson:
That’s another episode.
Braun:
You should ask the students. But from my personal perspective it’s going great. It’s been dynamic, exciting, it’s been a great learning experience. We’ve got a number of initiatives moving forward, you know we’re moving. We have a lot of aspirational plans for the college and I think were making progress on those plans everyday.
Larson:
And so one of the things we want to talk about here is some of those plans one of which is, we’ve kicked off kind of a strategic vision process for the college, what do we look like in a few years how do we get there. But before we get to that… you know we’re around July 4th, something happened 20 years ago around July 4th as well. Twenty years ago, I was in middle school, you were not.
Braun:
I was a little older than that. You were just a kid.
Larson:
I was trying to get my Northern Wisconsin, you know, community and friends to get excited about something that happened twenty years ago and now I’m sitting here with the guy who helped land the first Mars rover on Mars, 20 years ago this July 4th. I mean you gotta talk about that a little bit.
Braun:
Sure. Sure. First of all it’s hard to believe that it’s been twenty years but Pathfinder was, Mars Pathfinder, was one of those moments, one of those projects that no matter what you do in your career you always look back on and you say ‘wow, that was it.’ It was an amazing experience, I actually started working on it in 1992 around Christmas time 1992. There was a very small team of folks mostly at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. That designed that mission from a clean slate, built up the hardware, tested it, made it happen, flew it all the way to Mars. There were actually just four of us on the navigation team that were responsible for basically flying the spacecraft from launch all the way around the Sun and interplanetary space to Mars to just the right landing spot on the surface. Today those teams have 30, 50 people on ‘em. And that’s the way Pathfinder was, whether it was the airbag system or the parachute or the rover itself the teams were really small. In 1992 by that time I had done about 5 years of paper studies about what it would be like to land humans on Mars but I had never done anything real. And Pathfinder was actually my first chance to land something for real. Getting that type of responsibility and being involved in the project from start all the way to landing was an incredible experience.
Larson:
How did you go from student to landing something on Mars? How did you get your start?
Braun:
Yeah well so, first of all I should point out that when I was just a kid in elementary school I actually lived in Maryland not far from the Goddard Spaceflight Center. And I had a neighbor who brought me to work one day – it happened to be the day that they landed the Viking 1 lander. Which was the first U.S. lander on another planet, no rover, but the first lander.
Larson:
In the 70s.
Braun:
1976, July 20th – and so I sat in this kind of room outside the control room looking through the glass as these grown men, these engineers 30, 40, 50 years old, who were responsible for landing Viking, I watched them jump up and down in excitement when they got the signal back that Viking 1 lander had landed successfully.
Larson:
And at that point it probably was all men, something we can talk about.
Braun:
It was all men, and it was just a signal no pictures we couldn’t send pictures back quick enough back then.
Larson:
Sure
Braun:
They were jumping up and down trying to high five like only engineers can. And I said to myself, ‘wow I’d really like to do that one day’. I didn’t realize that I would become an aerospace engineer but then I finished high school, went off to college I ended up going to NASA Langley, my reason for going to NASA Langley is they had managed the Viking mission and I thought, ya know, if there’s ever gonna be a Mars mission they’re probably gonna do it at Langley again. I knew very little about the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and their prowess and their capabilities in robotic explorations. So I went off to Langley and then it turned out when JPL started Mars Pathfinder they came to Langley looking for Viking people because they wanted a few experienced folks for their team. And all the Viking people had retired and all they found was this ya know, this relatively junior kid of an engineer. Who had been doing computer simulations of Mars landings for years. And so they asked me to join the team and I was more than happy to do so.
Larson:
But so, there was no Mohawk guy in the Viking control room?
Braun:
Well there was Gentry Lee. [laughs] Gentry had kind of bald hair on top and then long, ya know, long hair on the sides. There were quite a few colorful people wearing rainbow suspenders and all kinds of things like that, but it was a little more subdued back then. Because it robotic exploration not human spaceflight, people weren’t wearing button up shirts and the ties that you’re thinking of from like the Apollo movies and things like that, it was a little more laid back,
But you’re right -- it was not a very diverse team. And actually, if I think back on Mars Pathfinder we had, I’d say, a handful of women that were heavily involved with the project so that’s a paradigm change relative to Viking. But still it wasn’t nearly as diverse as the Mars missions are today. There are many more women and people from all sorts of background working at NASA on both robotic and human exploration missions now and over the course of my career I mean you can really notice the change. It’s very positive change.
Larson:
And that’s obviously something here at CU we’re focused on. So, you’re obviously still involved in planetary exploration pushing out into the Solar System, but how I got know you and got to work with you was in DC working on those far reaching technologies, how do we develop the stuff that will enable us to do more in space and for less cost cause it’s so pricey. Talk about that; what transition from mission oriented like ‘hey let’s land this thing’ to ‘let’s develop a portfolio, a suite, of technologies to do more.’
Braun:
Right, so when I worked on, well after Mars Pathfinder was successful there were lots of opportunities to work on other robotic missions this was in the better, faster, cheaper days. Dan Goldman was the NASA administrator and the way we made all these missions work, other Mars missions, missions that samples from the tail of a comet, ya know Stardust, missions that brought back particles from a solar wind – Genesis. A whole array of orbiters and sample return missions and landers, the way we made those missions work was we were investing in technologies and we were actually trying new things across a broad spectrum of missions. And the idea was there were so many missions that we could try new technologies, we could keep the cost down and if one or two of the missions didn’t work out then ya know that was the price of admission, so to speak. But in bulk if 80 percent, 90 percent of the missions accomplish their science goals that would be a great thing for the nation and also from a cost standpoint.
Larson:
Failure was priced in.
Braun:
Yeah, failure was an option -- to put it that way. And that led to all kinds of innovation in the program and so I saw that first hand and what happened at NASA and what tends to happen in any large organization is as you have success and ya know we sprinkled a few failures in there as well. But as you have success you kind of like that and you wanna have more success and so you start being more and more risk adverse and you start weeding out technologies or missions that require new technologies and I saw that happening at NASA at an alarming accelerating pace. And I wanted to do something about that, I wanted to try to bring all the researchers at the NASA centers and at universities around the country, small businesses around the country I wanted to be their representative in the discussion about the importance of investing in technology. So in 2010 when administrator Charlie Bolden asked me to come to Washington –
Larson:
The head of NASA.
Braun:
The head of NASA. He asked me to come to Washington to be the chief technologist, the first time that NASA would have a chief technologist in about a decade I just couldn’t resist. And thankfully a whole bunch of people from around the country came to Washington to join me. Certainly not anything I did by myself, and this team of folks created this new organization that’s now called the space technology mission directorate. We designed the programs that congress authorized and then provided funding for and those programs have been clicking along at $600 or $700 million a year since about 2010, so I’m very proud of that.
Larson:
So getting you’re start you said growing up partially in Maryland, it sounds like you had, ya know we like to talk about the Sputnik moment for the country or for the world.
Braun:
That was before my time.
Larson:
It sounds like you had a Viking moment. Viking being the spacecraft that landed on Mars in the 70s. Is that literally it, you point back to that moment for what’s driven you?
Braun:
Yeah, so I was around, I was alive when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon…
Larson:
Also in July, a lot of July milestones.
Braun:
There’s a reason for that. Also July 20th.
Larson:
Exactly.
Braun:
So I was alive I was 4 years, uh, 3 years old almost 4 when that occurred. Im told I watched it on TV but I have no recollection of that whatsoever. So for me, the first real space thing I noticed was certainly Viking and that captured my attention in a significant way, its also true that my father was an electrical engineer, he worked on Navy programs at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. My mom was a social worker and a hospital administrator and she probably taught me the people side of things I would say. And ya know maybe im a mix of them in some ways. But when I went off to college at Penn State –
Larson:
Did you just say that you maybe a mix of your parents?
Braun:
Yeah... a little bit of a mix. A good mix of them.
Larson:
Maybe you are.
Braun:
Ehh. But when I went off to college at Penn State, I knew I wanted to be in engineering I didn’t know what kind. And the way Penn State works you’re just in engineering for your first two years and you declare your major in your junior year. And so it gave me time to look at several different majors I considered mechanical I remember thinking about electrical engineering because my dad was an electrical engineer. But I kept getting drawn back to aerospace and possibly that was because of what I saw as a child in the Viking landing.
Larson:
Sure, ya know coming from D.C., coming from Georgia, growing up with a heritage of engineering it sounds like you had EQ and IQ in your household. Did you ever envision you would be dean of a college of 6000 students and 400 faculty?
Braun:
[Laughs] No, no. I used to think I’d work at NASA or at industry until I was about ready to retire and then I might, as a second career, might look at academia.
Larson:
Were you one of those kids when people asked what you wanted to be you had a succinct answer?
Braun:
I don’t know. Probably.
Larson:
You don’t remember?
Braun:
Ya know, I probably had different answers at different times. I wasn’t one of those kids that knew I always wanted to be an aerospace engineer. I probably wanted to be a fireman when I was young, right, I probably wanted to be a rock star at one point or a racecar driver. I was always interested in science so I at some time probably said astronomer at one point in my life. In high school I remember I wrote a few essays on being an architect. I was gonna be a designer of buildings that would change peoples lives. And you can certainly change peoples lives as an aerospace engineer. Or really as any engineer. I always loved working with students at NASA and I wanted to do more of that. I wanted to grow educational programs grow research programs that would build students and turn them into the kinds of people that NASA or the aerospace industry or if you think more generally; the energy industry the robotics industry the software industry would find useful. I did that for a number of years as a faculty member at Georgia Tech. And I came here to CU Boulder to basically try to do that on a larger scale and really that’s what being a dean is. Being a dean of this college is to me is about creating opportunities, creating educational programs, creating research activities that give our students the opportunities to grow into being the people that our society needs in the 21st century. There’s no question that our society is becoming more and more technologically sophisticated there’s no question that if you wanna make a difference in the world today you have to know something about computers or about environmental science or energy or civil engineering, environmental engineering. The kinds of things that we teach in our STEM educational programs, science technology engineering and mathematics, are more and more critical to our workforce. And so what being a dean is really, is about growing the capabilities of this institution to provide those opportunities for our students. And its not just the faculty and the staff that work with the students in that way, it’s actually our alumni our industry partners its people all across the campus that teach math that teach physics to our engineering students. Ya know its actually a very large collective that is providing these opportunities for our students. And my job as dean is to organize that. Be the conductor of the orchestra that is creating these engineers and these scientists. And I take that responsibility very seriously, and I also think that this college has tremendous potential. The students here are fantastic the faculty are stellar its really all about connecting what we’re doing what we’ve been doing with industry needs. That’s the piece that perhaps has been missing or ehhh hasn’t been missing the piece that can be grown. The connections with industry, ya know here we are in Boulder on the CU boulder campus and were surrounded by national labs. We’re surrounded in a state that has an amazingly strong industry in aerospace in energy in robotics in software in the environment just across the board it’s one of the reasons we have the lowest unemployment’s in the country is because of the strength of our industry. And so I see CU Boulder as the flagship educational institution in the state. And this college, frankly, as the center of CU Boulder’s STEM oriented learning opportunities. And so, if the future is about STEM and CU Boulder is the flagship campus for the state then ya know what we do here in the college is incredibly important to the economic vitality of the state and the national security of our country and to the quality of life of all people.
Larson:
We kicked off the strategic vision process, or you did, with the team here in January. As like, where do we want to be in 5 years and how do we get there. Why don’t you talk about that and how you’ve used that before in your roles at NASA, you’ve created a company, in Georgia tech. Why is that so important for a large organization?
Braun:
So, the vision process that we’ve just concluded is incredibly important to the future of the college. And the reason frankly is because I can’t do it by myself. It doesn’t matter –
Larson:
This isn’t about you, this isn’t the Bobby vision.
Braun:
No it’s not. It doesn’t matter frankly how strong of a leader I am if the college isn’t all rowing in the same direction, were not gonna get where we need to go. So the purpose of the visioning process was to hear from all members of the faculty and the staff and the students.
Larson:
Didn’t you get input from parents?
Braun:
Oh, we did! Once we put it online we got all kinds of inputs. We got input from alumni, input from industry and stakeholders. I even got some input directly from some of the agency leaders back in Washington D.C. So yeah, we got a wide swath of input both internal to the college and external. And what we did through a series of workshops is we just talked it out we had kind of a brainstorming activity around different themes that were emerging. And we collected those ideas and tried to organize them and what came out of that process whas a set of four strategic theme with a set of action oriented goals there’s no doubt I coulda come up with that on my own. But more importantly because the whole college was invited to participate and because much of the college did it really does represent a shared vision for where the college thinks it should go in the future. So, as the dean my job becomes implementing that vison. So, there’s four major themes, the first is to accelerate our research impact and what I mean is really that word impact. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean grow our research dollars, although that is a component of the theme as well but really what it means is connect our research to the major state national and global challenges of our time. To have an impact upon society the second major theme is to embrace our public education mission and there that word embrace means a lot to me because we are a public engineering organization and we tend to compare ourselves broadly to other engineering organizations across the country and to me there’s something very nice about being a public engineering organization, were here for the public good. All though private institutions do contribute to the public good a good deal but it’s not in their charter to do so. So, what does embrace our public education mission look lie? Well it means provide opportunities for every Coloradan that’s aspiring to be an engineer regardless of what high school they went to or what their socio-economic status is or gender or ethnicity were here to provide those opportunities. And frankly it means draw some of the best talent from around the country to Colorado because where people go to school they -assuming there are opportunities and there are a lot of opportunities here in Colorado – people wanna stay. And so this college can be an economic engine for the state and that’s part of our economic education mission as well. The third strategic theme is to expand our global reach -
Larson:
And I’d say these aren’t in order, it’s more bullets.
Braun:
Just running it down my head, in order. Is to expand our global reach and what I mean by that is that this college actually has a remarkable capability to shape the world today. What were doing in our engineering for developing communities activities and through even student clubs like engineering without borders which was founded on this campus and is now international in scope. We’re really able to engage our students and our staff and our faculty in major global challenges that are improving people’s lives not just in the state of Colorado or in the U.S. but around the world. Were the home of a large segment of international students who come here to study.
Larson:
So were not just shaping the globe were being shaped by the globe.
Braun:
We’re being affected by the globe and creating opportunities for those around the globe both are true when those students come here. They certainly influence our Colorado students, Colorado residents students and hopefully they’re shaped for the better by being here as well.
Larson:
My first weeks here and yours as well, you engaged with the internationally community, why was that so important to you?
Braun:
it was important to me because number 1 they were feeling threatened at that time. And 2 they’re not international students to me they’re engineers. That is a characteristic, that is the characteristic that ties us all together. Whether you’re from right here in Colorado or California or Texas or some country around the world you come here for engineering. When actually thing that heartened me the most about that event that we held, by the way it was late on a Friday and we didn’t announce it till Friday morning it was in a room that would hold maybe 100 people. We had about 200 people there and they were a huge swath of the college I mean they were faculty, staff, students, international students. We all kinda came together to support our international students in their moment of need.
Larson:
And this was, not to avoid the subject, this was in early February when some stuff came out of DC about international travel and the Administration’s executive order, we held a forum that you led.
Braun:
We did, and you know what I found most remarkable about that forum was the way our domestic students came out and supported their engineering brothers and sisters. There were actually more domestic students there I think than international students and I just found that wonderful I think that’s a real positive characteristic about this college. People genuinely care about each other. And then the final strategic theme in the vision is to enrich our professional environment. Be the best place to work. That’s a foundational theme to me that is required to enable the other 3, if we don’t make progress on that then we won’t make progress on the other 3. So being that place means being in place where you feel safe where you feel valued, feel respected. Being in a place where when you start a meeting with someone else you assume good intent about their reason for being in the meeting. And they likewise assume good intent about you so that you can have honest and open discussions. Its really the only way to move the organization forward, we do have some pretty significant organizational goals around building our workforce around growing a more diverse engineering body both in the student population in the faculty and the staff. Those kinds of things they can be difficult conversations to have.
Larson:
Difficult to start.
Braun:
We’ve definitely started.
Larson:
We’ve started.
Braun:
I’m just saying if you don’t assume good intent from those around you then those conversations are even more difficult. So we have to start there from sort of an open transparent, consistent communication perspective and over time we have to grow this college into the place that everyone on campus wants to be. And the place that people all around the country are trying to come to, because it is the best place to be.
Larson:
I think that’s a good place to close with a final question of what does success look like? Where are we optimally in 4-5 years under dean Braun?
Braun:
That’s just funny to hear. Yeah so, there’s no doubt that the college will be bigger in the next 5 years and that will be easy to measure. The number of students will increase the number of faculty and staff will be increased. The number of research expenditures will be increased. There’s all these numbers that we can easily count but that’s not what success looks like, success to me looks like when we are the place that others are turning to because we are known as thought leaders. Either in our engineering education or in the research that were doing. Thought leaders that are changing and impacting society, thought leaders that are building our economy, thought leaders that are impacting our national security, and those that are improving our quality of life. So a thought leader to me is a go to person.
Larson:
An expert?
Braun:
There are a lot of experts who aren’t go to people. A thought leader is a person who, lets just say maybe you work in the white house one day if you’re lucky, Phil. And you’re in some meeting with lets say the presidents science advisor and lets say he says ‘the president wants to start a new brain initiative. Go get me the 6 leaders in the field.’ And your job is to call em up and get em to come Washington. I want someone’s phone right here on this campus to ring. So it doesn’t have to be the president that thinks you’re a thought leader. But generally speaking, we all know people in academia that are thought of as thought leaders and I wanna grow more of them in this college.
Larson:
There’s a lot of experts.
Braun:
There’s a lot of experts there’s fewer thought leaders.
Larson:
That can have impact on things of national priority.
Braun:
Yeah.
Larson:
Bobby thank you, for being our first guest.
Braun:
Thank you Phil, it’s a pleasure to be here today.
Announcer:
This has been On CUE, for more information visit Colorado.edu/Engineering.
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