MDRS Crew 15
March 15 to 29, 2003

The crew of the Mars Desert Research Station rotates every 2 weeks. These are the scientists and engineers who live and work on site within the MDRS. They explore all of the facets of human exploration in a simulated Mars environment. The MDRS will be active for a 7 month period.

Name	Speciality
David Fuller	Commander
Jody Tinsley	Chief Geologist
April Childress	Crew Archivist
Dr. Derek O'Keeffe	Chief Engineer
Dr. Kim Binsted	Computer / Comms Specialist
Tim O'Connor	Chief Biologist / Astronomer

David Fuller	Crew 15 Mission Commander David Fuller has held a wide variety of jobs in air and space operations, ranging from air traffic controller to NASA mission controller to flight operations director for several European Space Agency payloads to operations engineer for commercial satellites. He has worked as a biomedical engineer for both the NASA and German Space Agency Flight Surgeon. He has also flown on NASA and ESA parabolic aircraft, crewed on off-shore racing yachts, and holds a degree in Biomedical Engineering from Texas A&M University. His current interest is risk management in realtime operations and the behavioral aspects of operations teams. He is the Chair of the Sacramento Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronuatics (AIAA), member of the AIAA Space Operations Technical Committee, and speaks at local schools on topics ranging from human physiology in space to communications satellites. He lives on a 10 acre in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento, California, with his wife Terri, a horse, 5 llamas, a dog, and a cat.
Jody Tinsley	Jody Tinsley grew up in the western corner of South Carolina, a region called the Upstate. His father worked in a rock quarry, which got him interested in geology early, but he has always been taken by a variety of topics. These varied interests led him to pursue a broad rather than deep series of studies at Clemson University, where he earned bachelor degrees in English and in geology, and then later an M.A. in English Literature and an M.S. in Hydrogeology. He is currently a Lecturer in Geology at Clemson, where he teaches various introductory classes and labs. He is interested in the interplay between science and society, and he tries to share these connections with his students. In his leisure time, he enjoys river trips, by raft and canoe, hiking, running, reading, playing softball and ultimate Frisbee, and other outdoor sports. He is also trying to learn to play the guitar, and he gets together with friends to play and sing a bit of folk and bluegrass music. His hobby of carpentry will pay off soon, he hopes, in that he and April are planning to build a house over the next year or so using a passive solar design and alternative energy systems.
April Childress	With an MA from the University of Arkansas, April Childress's field is communications. She is an Instructor of English at Greenville Technical College, in Greenville, SC. There she teaches writing and literature classes. She also does occasional editing and technical writing. She is Crew 15's journalist. She and Jody are the first married couple to serve on an MDRS crew. Both are interested in alternative energy systems, so the GreenHab and the limited energy resources of the Hab, along with the dynamics of a group living in a limited space with limited power resources, are research priorities. April's task at the station is to record the day-to-day lives of the crew. She will describe what the MDRS experience is so that those who can't come to the Hab themselves can get a feel for the experience. Robert Zubrin commented that no one today would care about the Lewis and Clark expedition if Clark hadn't kept a journal; working on that assumption, April's job is to keep a similar journal for Crew 15. As a matter of fact, a few summers ago, she and Jody retraced William Clark's trip on the Yellowstone River, canoeing across Montana. Besides canoeing, they also enjoy reading, baseball, cycle touring, and spending time in the woods.
Dr. Derek O'Keeffe	Derek O'Keeffe (B.Eng. M.Eng. Ph.D.) is a full time lecturer / researcher at the University of Limerick and is our first Irish Crew Member. At college he teaches electronic / computer modules to undergrad / postgrad degree programs where he also supervises several research postgraduate (Masters/Ph.D.) students and ten final year project students. He has previously worked in Salisbury Hospital, UK which is a worldwide centre for excellence in the rehabilitation of paralysis by functional electrical stimulation. He has also worked in various engineering roles in Analog Devices and ESB, Ireland. He has significant experience in developing embedded and software systems for the investigation and rehabilitation of various biomedical engineering problems. He is involved with research projects investigating the use of the Internet as an e-learning environment, the development of autonomous robots and space systems. At the moment his main area of research is the investigation of optimal stimulation pattern envelopes for the correction of lower leg foot drop in hemiplegia. For fun he likes to fly planes and go scuba diving and one of his main passions is travelling to the four corners of the world, where he tests his global theory that "Adventure will Find You !". He is also a relatively keen sportsfan (Black Belt Taekwondo, Marathon runner, Climbing Mountains) and he enjoy the movies.
Kim Binstead	Kim Binstead did her BSc in Physics at McGill (1991), and her PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh (1996). Her thesis topic was the computational modeling and generation of punning riddles, and her program, JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine) generated puns such as "What do you call a Martian who drinks beer? An ale-ien!". She then went to Japan, where she did research at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories on human-computer interfaces, and then started a company creating social software agents for mobile phones. Then, last year, she decided that academia in Hawaii was a much more attractive prospect than business in Tokyo, and took a faculty position at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where she does research and teach courses in artificial intelligence, mobile devices, and computational exolinguistics. Her hobbies include scuba diving (especially underwater videography), flying (she received her private pilot’s licence in 2002), kayaking and improvisational comedy.
Tim O'Connor	Tim O'Connor is currently a member of the Svoboda lab, in the neurobiology department at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in NY. Tim spent the two years prior to that working for Ericsson, developing wireless telecommunications infrastructure. During his time at Ericsson he spent a good amount of time travelling to destinations such as Denmark, Sweden, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Canada. He is also currently pursuing an MSEE at Columbia University, where he recently finished a graduate certificate program in Genomic Engineering. His undergraduate degree is a double-major in Physics and Astronomy from SUNY Stony Brook.