“I liked blacksmithing when I was a kid. I didn’t have a forge or anything to heat the metal really easy, but I would hammer things out as well as I could.
“With metallurgy, you probably can’t look around any single room in the world and not see something that has to do with a metal or an alloy. For me, [my interest in materials engineering] was like, ‘How does it work? What makes it strong? What makes it do what it’s supposed to do?’
“With metallurgy and materials engineering, it’s about tradeoffs and trying to find out what material can I design that has the right properties that I need, and then maybe tweak it from there to reduce some of the detriments.
“I’ve been working with heat treating ever since I started working with shape memory alloys. We actually have our own Material Processing Laboratory at NASA Glenn where we can melt our own ingots of whatever alloys we’re looking at.
“In some cases, it’s similar to old-time blacksmithing.”
— Glen Bigelow, Materials Engineer, Glenn Research Center
Image Credit: NASA / Bridget Caswell
Interviewer: NASA / Tahira Allen