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Melissa Sandlin, born
in Seoul, South Korea, was adopted by the Sandlin family at the
age of 5 months. She grew up in Kankakee, Illinois, the third of
four adopted children. Melissa was always an excellent student
and she graduated valedictorian of Kankakee High School in
1991.
In high school, a
summer enrichment program at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign helped Melissa discover engineering. The
two-week camp introduced minority students to the engineering
fields offered by the University. During the camp, Melissa
toured a laboratory where industrial robots were busy building
plastic replicas of themselves. In that moment, she was hooked.
Five years later, she was studying in that very same lab. That
summer experience shaped not only Melissa¡¯s career path in
manufacturing automation, but also her commitment to discovering
and fostering the engineers of tomorrow.
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After earning her BS
in Mechanical Engineering at University of Illinois, Melissa
received an MS degree at Georgia Institute of Technology,
concentrating on machine vision and automation for the food
processing industry.
Melissa made her mark
in engineering first in telecommunications, where she was first,
a mechanical designer for Lucent Technologies, and later a
manufacturing engineer for Corvis Corporation, Columbia MD. In
the former position, at the Lucent laboratory in Makuhari,
Japan, she was able to apply her major studies in engineering,
but also her minor studies in Japanese.
Melissa then joined
her current employer, Northrop Grumman Corporation, where she
again demonstrated her engineering expertise and professional
drive. As a process engineer, she was responsible for an x-ray
inspection process, examining the quality of solder joints in
military electronics. She then became a project engineer,
following a single product through its entire life cycle. In
this role, she addressed a wide range of issues, from material
vendor problems to manufacturing process problems. She led
several cost reduction and yield improvement project teams for
her product, the Joint Strike Fighter Transmit/Receive Module.
In the course of her work, she earned a Six Sigma Green Belt.
The quality of her
work has earned her praise and recognition, but she is the first
to admit that she could not have done it without the help of
mentors. She readily pays that help forward to the next
generation of students. Melissa volunteers for DiscoverE, a
program that introduces engineering to grade school through high
school students. She also leads the WORTHY Program, a high
school mentoring program aimed at inner city students. She feels
that the opportunities that were afforded to her should be
available to every student. She recognizes that nothing is more
important than helping future generations shape their future
and, at the same time, the future of engineering.
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