MDRS Crew 49
April 23 - May 6, 2005

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
Bill Clancey	NASA Ames, Computer Scientist
Maarten Sierhuis	NASA Ames, RIACS, Computer Scientist
Brent Garry	SUNY-Buffalo, Geologist
Paul Tompkins	NASA Ames, QSS Group, Computer Scientist
Rick Alena	NASA Ames, Systems Engineer
Vandi Verma	NASA Ames, QSS Group, Computer Scientist
John Dowding	NASA Ames, Univ. of California/Santa Cruz, Computer Scientist
Ron van Hoof	NASA Ames, QSS Group, Software Engineer
Mike Scott	NASA Ames, QSS Group, Software Engineer

Bill Clancey	Crew 49 Mission Commander Bill Clancey is a cognitive scientist with a Mathematical Sciences BA from Rice University and a Computer Science PhD from Stanford University. He has been responsible for some of the earliest computer programs to model expert reasoning, with applications in medical diagnosis and teaching. Bill works at NASA-Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, as Chief Scientist for Human-Centered Computing, on leave from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (Pensacola). At Ames, Bill manages the Work Systems Design and Evaluation Group, a multidisiplinary team that integrates social science, psychology, and software engineering. He is co-inventor of the Brahms modeling and simulation program, which is being applied to the power systems of MDRS during Rotation 49. Bill is a founding member of the Mars Society and on the board of the Association for Mars Explorers. He has lived and worked at Haughton Crater on Devon Island for over 3 months since 1998. He was an inaugural FMARS crew member in 2001 and led MDRS Rotations 5, 16, 29, and 38. He has presented invited talks in 20 countries and enjoys speaking in schools and museums. His interests include photography, adventure travel, hiking, video, and writing.
Maarten Sierhuis	Maarten Sierhuis is a computer scientist, with a Ph.D. in social science and informatics from the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Early on in his career he specialized in designing expert systems, with a particular focus on the role of such systems in the larger context of the total work process. Today he believes that technology designers need a deep understanding of how people work in practice, before they even attempt to develop technology for people. His research in the last ten years has focused on computational modeling and simulation techniques for understanding how people work in practice. In technical terms we call this work practice modeling and simulation. He beliefs that through modeling the practice and context in which work occurs, software designers will have a better understanding of people and software systems might become better equipped in assisting people, while enhancing people's work life. Our field test in this mission is applying some of this research and testing it in the harsh reality, of yet ill-defined practices, of planetary EVAs.
Brent Garry	Brent Garry has recently completed a Ph.D. (2006) in Geology at the University at Buffalo, New York. His dissertation focused on the emplacement of channeled lava flows in different environments, including Mars. For the last year, he has worked as a Research Scientist for the Smithsonian Institution in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum. He received a B.S. (1999) in Geology from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and an M.S. (2001) in Geology from the University of Kentucky. This is Brent’s fourth trip to MDRS (Crews 16, 28, 38). A native of Virginia, Brent became hooked on the space program as a youngster when he lived in Jacksonville, Florida during the early 1980's and his family would watch shuttle launches their front yard. Brent also loves to teach science to elementary and middle school kids. So far, his favorite education opportunity has been as a counselor at Space Camp teaching the future generation of astronauts, scientists, and engineers. In his spare time, he likes to play volleyball, SCUBA dive, draw, and watch 80's movies.
Paul Tompkins	Paul Tompkins is a research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center. He received his B.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT (1992) and then worked as a mission analyst and orbital operations team leader for commercial spacecraft programs for five years at Hughes Space and Communications. As a Hughes Graduate Fellow, Paul earned his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University (1997) with a focus on control and robotics. After leaving Hughes in 1998, he began pursing a doctoral degree in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. His research leveraged his prior experience in spacecraft mission planning to investigate automated, long-distance path and mission planning for planetary rovers considering temporal and geometric constraints, and renewable resources. As part of that work, he conducted field experiments with the Hyperion rover in the Canadian Arctic in 2001 as a member of the Sun-Synchronous Navigation project, and three consecutive years of field work in the Atacama Desert on the Hyperion and Zoe rovers as part of the Life in the Atacama project. He earned his Ph.D. in 2004 and began work at NASA Ames soon afterward. Paul is currently the co-lead for the Intelligent Autonomous Execution Architecture (IDEA) team at NASA Ames, where he is helping to develop software for automated, model-based execution. He is also the systems architecture lead for the Spacecraft Autonomy for Vehicles and Habitats (SAVH) project, which is developing technologies for variable autonomous control for the Crew Exploration Vehicle and lunar surface systems. In his free time, Paul enjoys rock climbing, mountaineering, Japanese martial arts and listening to fusion jazz music.
Rick Alena	Rick Alena is a computer engineer at NASA Ames Research Center performing system engineering and analysis for the Constellation Program as part of the Discovery and Systems Health Area in the Intelligent Systems Division. He received his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley and has worked on complex real-time computer systems and instrumentation including Computed Tomography scanners for medical and industrial use, implantable biosensors, multiprocessor computer systems and digital musical instruments. His NASA portfolio includes leading the Advanced Diagnostic Systems project for the International Space Station (ISS) and flight experiments aboard Shuttle, Mir and ISS during STS-74, STS-76, STS-81, and STS-92. These experiments allowed adoption of wireless networks for ISS and applied portable diagnostic tools for Control Momentum Gyro checkout aboard ISS. He led the Intelligent Mobile Technologies group, building distributed mobile computing systems supporting field science, consisting of wearable high-performance computers in backpacks providing voice recognition, medical sensing and hosting agent-based software. These information backpacks were used with All-Terrain Vehicles and robots using mesh wireless networks for human planetary exploration simulations in Mars analog environments conducted in the Canadian Arctic and American desert. His research interests are designing Enterprise information systems for mission and vehicle management, spacecraft health management systems and adaptable wireless computing and communication systems. He was a crewmember for MDRS 16, 29 and 38 and will be working habitat engineering for MDRS 49.
Vandi Verma	Vandi Verma is a Research Scientist in the Intelligent Systems division at NASA Ames Research Center. Space Exploration provides the motivation for much of her research and development efforts. She is actively involved in developing a safe and verifiable language for representing plans and procedures that easily interfaces to humans and automation. At the Mars Desert Research Station Vandi will be working on developing procedures for crew operation in this language. Other projects that she is currently working on include developing automated systems that execute procedures on-board autonomous spacecraft, rovers, and habitats in conjunction with ground and crew; and developing algorithms for diagnosis of Solid Rocket Motors for the Crew Launch Vehicle. She has a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where her research focused on developing algorithms for diagnosing faults in computationally constrained dynamic systems. The robots she has worked on have included Nomad (CMU, Antarctic meteorite search), Lama (LAAS, France), Bullwinkle (CMU, long-range Mars navigation), Hyperion (CMU, Sun-synchronous navigation), K9 (NASA Ames), and the robotic astrobiologist (CMU, life in the Atacama project). She also has masters degrees in Robotics and Computer Science and a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering. In her spare time, among other things she enjoys flying airplanes, rock climbing, hiking, skiing, running, dancing, and cooking with friends and family.
John Dowding	I am the speech and language guy, having primary responsibility for the spoken dialogue systems used by our geologists and hab crew to interact with their hardware and software systems by voice. My educational background is in Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics from Syracuse Univesity and the University of Pennsylvania, and I've been working in language understanding and speech science for 20 years, at places like Unisys Corporation, SRI International, NASA Ames Research Center, and Stanford University. This will be my 4th visit to MDRS, following Rotation 16 in 2003, Rotation 29 in 2004, and part of the non-Hab crew in Rotation 38 in 2005. I am looking forward to new challanges during this year's rotation, where we plan to equip crew members with Bluetooth microphones to record their speech as they carry out routine hab maintenance activities, and to provide speech-based computer assistance in monitoring the hab power systems. I hope this will contribute to the speech data set we have been collecting over the past 4 years, and further our research on distinguishing computer-directed speech from causual person-person speech.
Ron van Hoof	Ron van Hoof is a computer scientist with a Master's degree in Knowledge Engineering from the University of Middlesex, London, England and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Hogeschool West-Brabant in the Netherlands. Currently Ron works for QSS Group, Inc. at NASA Ames Research Center where his work involves the development of a multi-agent modeling language, simulation environment and real-time agent execution environment used to both simulate and support work practice (BRAHMS). Brahms is a data driven (forward chaining) discrete event multi-agent environment. Ron's responsibilities include being the development lead, system architect and software engineer responsible for the Brahms language, Brahms virtual machine, the integration of the Brahms components and to both develop and support the development of Brahms-based distributed agent systems to support planetary exploration and to support collaboration between crew members, mission operations personnel and autonomy systems.
Mike Scott	Mike Scott is a software engineer with a B.S in biological sciences from the University of Buffalo and an MFA in design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He has worked for the past six years developing tools for modeling in the Brahms language. He has also helped in developing the Brahms agents and interfaces that form the core of the Mobile Agents system. His software for the Mobile Agents Project has been field-tested at MDRS during the 2004, 2005, and 2006 seasons. He presently lives and works in Blue Hill, Maine where he exercises his interests in hiking, tide-pooling, playing the violin and woodlot management.