On any given evening, most people may gaze up at the moon, marvel at its beauty and move on.
Levi Grinestaff is not most people.
For Grinestaff BS’16, MS’19, the moon is far more than an astral object — it’s an extension of his workplace and part of a lifelong fascination with flight that propelled him to study systems engineering at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas.
“We just had a supermoon,” Grinestaff said during a recent conversation. “The moon happens to be a little closer to the Earth, and it looks bigger in the sky. So yeah, I went out and looked at the moon. I don’t know if I can always tap into that wonder, because when you do something every day for work, it becomes mundane.”
If Grinestaff seems mildly blasé about the awe-inspiring expanses of the galaxy, it’s because the moon and stars are a literal part of his everyday routine down here on Earth. Grinestaff is a systems engineer stationed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where he’s worked for a little over a year after stints at Nanoracks LLC, Texas Instruments Inc. and Geospace Technologies Corp.
“I work within the Johnson Space Center’s engineering directorate, and I have the role of a deputy system manager for a few early-stage programs,” Grinestaff said. “One for an Earth-orbiting space station and two for future moon rovers. System managers are basically responsible for one engineering aspect of the space vehicle, and the one I specialize in is active thermal control systems, or the fluid system that cools the spacecraft.
“The actual day-to-day is I’m a consultant, or a subject matter expert. It’s a lot of reviewing designs or engineering specifications, submitting feedback on those and occasionally, identifying risks.”
Grinestaff confessed that it was the mechanics of flying which most fascinated him growing up, not necessarily a burning desire to venture out to the furthest reaches of the universe.
“I was always pretty passionate about airplanes, not space systems as much — which is interesting — but airplanes,” he said. “When I was interviewing for jobs after I got my master’s degree, the aerospace companies, I definitely put more into those interviews than, say, the oil companies or the medical companies.
“That fascination with flight helped me out once I got into the aerospace industry. I came up to speed faster because I’ve been a bit of an aerospace nerd for a long time. I had some of that knowledge built up, but also as I was learning about things, I was going home and reading about them, or maybe just retaining more of what I was learning.”
“My systems engineering master’s degree from UTD absolutely opened the doors for me to get into the space industry.”
— Levi Grinestaff
NASA’s space program and the Johnson Space Center is a destination the Anchorage, Alaska native reached by beginning his journey a few hundred miles north at UT Dallas, first as an undergraduate student earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and then as a graduate student earning a master’s degree in systems engineering and management.
“Students in our program come from a wide variety of backgrounds — electrical, mechanical, biomedical engineering — which speaks to the multidisciplinary character of the degree in systems engineering and management,” said Dr. Stephen Yurkovich, head of the Department of Systems Engineering, Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering and systems engineering professor. “Our graduates find careers in many different industries, and with the management component they receive in the degree program, they are able to extend their career paths in areas of technical management.”
Grinestaff said, “UTD was an attractive option for going to school from a financial point of view, and the location was a good fit, too. It allowed me to get a little distance from my family, who was living in Houston at that time, but I was also close enough to come home easily for holidays and other times.”
When Grinestaff arrived in 2012, the campus looked — and felt — far different than it does more than a decade later. Indeed, Grinestaff, who fondly remembers the campus tour and his days “living at one of the residence halls,” still credits the ease of access with helping him feel at home on the main Richardson campus.
“You could walk everywhere, and I really enjoyed that,” he said, “the walkability and the relatively small feel of the campus.” Grinestaff’s future path was not yet clear to him when he was making his initial decision to attend UT Dallas and the Jonsson School. So much so that upon reflection, he called his decision to study mechanical engineering as an undergraduate “pretty much a whim.”
“I felt more comfortable with putting mechanical things together than with, say, electrical things,” Grinestaff said.
What might seem like a gamble at the time appears almost prescient in hindsight. Grinestaff nearly switched his major to computer science or software engineering — almost anticipating his future employment — but never made the leap.
“Broad curiosity outside of one technical discipline is, I would say, probably pretty important for a systems engineer,” Grinestaff said. “I spent a lot of my undergrad time getting deeper into mechanical engineering and even chemical engineering. But that interest I had in software was almost a foreshadowing of the interest I would have.”
Those interests, however, would be served well by his eventual pursuit of his master’s degree in systems engineering, a degree Grinestaff began working on as part of the Jonsson School’s Fast Track program, which was in its earliest days during his time on campus and allows students to take some classes that count toward both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.
“Systems engineering was the first program to develop a ‘cross track’ program wherein students from other disciplines can take the fast track into systems engineering to take coursework they cannot get in other programs,” Yurkovich said. “The Fast Track program allows the “best-of-the-best” students to get a head start on their graduate education. It is a very valuable program.”
Grinestaff concurred: “I would absolutely do the Fast Track program again. It seems like an obvious win.”
The reflexively agile nature of interdisciplinary pursuits — whether implicitly or explicitly — allows the degree programs of the Jonsson School to provide a value far beyond the chosen course of study.
Grinestaff (far left) with his UTDesign® Capstone team in 2016. His group teamed with UT Southwestern Medical Center to create a multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) foot orthosis.
By providing multiple avenues for students pursuing undergraduate or graduate paths to degrees to incorporate interests into their studies, it allows alumni like Grinestaff to end up on a path to a career in aerospace engineering, even though the Jonsson School does not currently offer a degree in that branch of the field.
Or, as Yurkovich put it: “We are proud to say that our program prepares students for many different disciplines.”
“The Fast Track program allows the best of the best students to get a head start on their graduate education. It is a very valuable program.”
— Dr. Stephen Yurkovich
Indeed, Grinestaff’s story illuminates how it is possible to blend academics and appreciation for subject matter into a robust, rewarding educational experience, which can, in turn, propel students all the way to the moon and beyond.
My systems engineering master’s degree from UTD absolutely opened the doors for me to get into the space industry,” Grinestaff said. “My undergrad [degree] in mechanical engineering and the master’s both gave me a great foundation that I could build on. They allowed me to jump into the space industry and not be a fish out of water.”
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