She may be relatively early in her career, but Taylor Fazzini, 30, had already tied on several “hats” before landing her current role as a modeling and simulation engineer for Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems. Most recently, she participated in Northrop’s Future Technical Leaders Program, completing one-year rotations on different programs across the U.S. “It was a really good way to explore disciplines outside of my own,” she says.

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What’s your aerospace origin story?    

I recently found this interview I did for my local paper my senior year of high school, where I said, “I’m going to college to earn a master’s degree in aerospace engineering. I hope to work with Lockheed Martin or NASA.” While my husband is the one who’s worked for both NASA and Lockheed Martin, I did end up with the master’s degree and have established a great career in the aerospace and defense industry with Northrop Grumman.

Favorite thing about your job?    

A lot of what we do is figure out how to incorporate new capabilities onto planes. So, take the SR-71 as an example: How do we make this thing fly high and fast? Where do we fly that minimizes the risk of our enemies seeing us, or minimizes the risk of us getting shot down, or gives us lots of places with runways to land if something goes wrong, a la Top Gun Maverick’s Dark Star disintegrating over the middle of nowhere? It’s really all about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, and we’ll never know what works unless we try it out.

What motivates you?    

Part of freshman year orientation at Embry-Riddle is watching “Top Gun” in the hangar next to the airplanes. I was giddy the whole time, so I’m constantly chasing the feeling of being absolutely awestruck by how cool military airplanes are; the goosebumps you get when you see a plane that you worked on get airborne for the first time. It’s also important to me to be a support system for anyone who wants or needs it, especially the younger engineers, so I’m constantly working to be the best mentor I can be. The next generation deserves that.

What’s a tech outside your field that fascinates you?    

I’m a huge Formula One fan. You have all of these teams with very strict budgets, operating on super limited resources and rapid development cycles. I kind of see it as a tangent sister to aerospace, because it is so focused on aerodynamics and propulsion. I’m also fascinated by food science and food chemistry. That idea of breaking the “rules” is extremely prevalent, where chefs understand the science well enough to understand how it can be manipulated in totally new ways for people to enjoy.

What will the world look like in 2050?    

With the massive growth of digital engineering and the infusion of machine learning and AI algorithms, design cycles will be drastically reduced. We’ll get better vehicles in shorter amounts of time, as long as acquisitions and certification figure out a way to keep up. That means it’ll also become increasingly important for students to learn the fundamentals. Anyone can push a button to make a code run, but it’ll still take old-school aerospace engineers to understand if the data coming out makes any sense at all.