In 1999, I completed my BSME at the University of Michigan, which was a dream of mine as far back as I can remember. In the fall of 1999, I started my career as a calibration engineer at Cummins Engine company. In the fall of 2000, I got an opportunity to return to Ann Arbor, Michigan. I took a job working for the Toyota Technical Center as a design engineer in the engine compartment design group. For 16 years, I worked in the same group. When I started, there were two members and we only had liaison design responsibility. To build trust with our headquarters, I spent 15 months living and working in Japan from 2004-2005. When I finished my role in 2016, I was managing a team of 8 engineers with responsibility for air intake, fuel, exhaust, secondary air, engine cooling, HV & EV cooling systems on 6 NA manufactured vehicles. Over that time, I gained experience developing new suppliers, new technology, and bench marking many competitive vehicles and systems. In 2017, I was given a new challenge of leading the design innovation group in the digital engineering design department. This diverse group of 13 members have responsibility for KBE applications, appearance digital assembly, VR enterprise applications, quality checking, powertrain CAD modeling and CAD training. At COE2018, I gave a presentation on the application of analytics to predict target users for KBE tools in CATIA V5. In 2019, I’m pressing forward to apply VR technology throughout our product development process to reduce lead time and physical prototyping costs.
