RELEASE
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08-091
NASA Marshall Center Engineer and New Orleans Native Virginia Cook Tickles Selected for NASA Fellowship Program
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Dr. Virginia Cook Tickles, an engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville and a native of New Orleans, has been selected for the NASA Administrator's Fellowship Program.
As part of her fellowship beginning in August, she will teach classes at Tennessee State University in Nashville for one year and Alabama A&M University in Huntsville for one year, emphasizing to students the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers. These fields of study are known as STEM -- fields crucial to NASA’s future exploration missions.
The fellowship program, founded in 1997 and administered by the United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corporation, is designed to enhance professional development of NASA employees. Also, for institutions serving minorities, the program helps increase their capability to participate in NASA's research and development programs. The program continues the Marshall Center’s long tradition of partnering with scientists, engineers, scholars and researchers at key institutions in Alabama and throughout the nation to promote education and expand STEM disciplines.
Those selected to participate in the annual, highly competitive process are full-time, permanent NASA civil servants, who hold a master's degree in a STEM field and are recommended by their NASA center director, branch chief or directorate lead.
Tickles, a cost engineer in the Marshall Center's Office of Strategic Analysis and Communications, will teach cost estimating and analysis for both undergraduate and graduate programs. She also will develop and implement a cost-estimating capability for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Conservation Research Center in Jackson, Miss.
"An old adage, 'To teach is to learn,' best describes how I can use this fellowship to empower future STEM students, and in return, receive personal fulfillment in being able to give back to historical black universities," Tickles said.
Tickles started her NASA career in 1989 as an aerospace engineer at the Marshall Center. Since 2004, she has performed cost estimating and analysis for conceptual launch vehicles, using cost models to predict the cost of space hardware.
Tickles graduated from McDonogh 35 Senior High School in New Orleans in 1979. She earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1985, and a master's degree in systems management from the Redstone Arsenal, Ala., campus of the Florida Institute of Technology in 1999. She earned a doctorate in urban higher education from Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., in 2006.
Tickles and her husband, Jordan, have six children and live in Huntsville.
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