Life 2.0 with Douglas Trent
Returning to Georgia Tech prompted his dream job with NASA as a senior data scientist
For some, retirement means slowing down and taking it easy. But for others, like Doug Trent, a life of leisure is nowhere near as appealing as pursuing a lost professional passion.
Trent, already a proud Double-Jacket with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science, had recently retired from a successful 26-year career at IBM, where an early promotion had moved him from engineering to management. And while being at IBM led to doing some big things, such as managing IBM’s Personal Computer lines worldwide and creating the world’s first smartphone, he had always missed being hands-on with the technical.
A New Degree for a New Career
“After retiring, I traveled the world, but always remained interested in business intelligence and decision sciences,” Trent said. “I had been tracking artificial intelligence and machine learning, and I saw how it was becoming the next revolution in business productivity.”
Trent found himself wanting to return to the workforce to try his hand in these developing fields but wasn’t quite sure how. When he heard about Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science (OMS) in Analytics program, he had his answer.
“I’d always wanted to be technical, but it didn’t work out that way. This was my chance to circle back.”
He eagerly joined the program’s first cohort, graduating in 2019.
A Space-Age Dream Come True
Today, Trent is a senior data scientist in the Office of the CIO at NASA’s Langley Research Center, leading teams to accelerate the adoption of AI technologies in support of NASA’s digital transformation strategy. He considers it his dream job, one that he credits directly to the OMS Analytics program.
“OMS Analytics requires a practicum internship, so I applied to 35+ firms,” he recalled. One of them was with NASA. “I’ve always been a space nerd. I grew up in the 60s, enthralled with the space race, watching NASA launch satellites into orbit and land men on the moon.”
“Just by coincidence, I had brought the family up from Florida to Virginia Beach on vacation,” he continued. “And the day we landed, I got a call from Hampton [Virginia], where NASA Langley is located, with their interest in talking to me. It had to be a sign!”
Two days later, Trent had landed the internship. “I had to pinch myself. I was a data scientist intern on the central information team at NASA! My childhood space-era dreams had come true.”
His practicum team was assigned a number of digital transformation projects involving workflow automation at Langley. One project focused on parking logistics across the 764-acre campus.
“We considered numerous options including acoustic sensors and magnetometers," Trent shared, "but being data science nerds (and deep learning neural nets are cool), we adapted Facebook's convolutional neural network (CNN) models in facial recognition to recognize vehicles instead of people, utilizing cameras on building rooftops. This garnered attention, and I received an offer to join NASA full-time.” He started the next month, while finishing his last class.
As if the fortuitous timing of the vacation in Virginia hadn’t been enough to indicate this was a match meant to be, Trent had written about NASA in his application essay for the OMS Analytics program. “It was almost eerily prescient,” he laughed. “Who could have guessed that two years later, I would be working for them?”
Trent has since worked on everything from studying methane clouds on Titan and the oceans beneath Europa’s frozen crust to monitoring the health of Earth’s coral reefs. His projects incorporate machine learning, computervision, information retrieval, natural language processing, robotic process automation, loT devices, and augmented/virtual reality.
He credits Georgia Tech’s OMS Analytics for not just opening the door, but for preparing him with the skills to shine once there.
“Life has key inflection points, where certain decisions affect everything that follows – your first job, who you marry, etc. Tech’s OMS Analytics program was one of those inflection points for me. I think of it as Life 2.0. Nothing that I’m doing now would have been possible without my analytics background. Just about everything I’m doing at NASA, I first learned through the analytics program classes in time series, simulation, regression, and machine learning. From the humble Langley internship projects, we’ve extended deep learning CNN models to a variety of new use cases. I’ve taken things to the next level, but the foundations were laid by the OMS Analytics program.”
One Step Back. Two Steps Forward.
Trent continues to be struck by the forward-looking nature of the curriculum, "Georgia Tech anticipated the future of data science — even emphasizing R and Python back in 2017. Those two languages dominate the data science field now. I didn’t know either before the program. Now, it’s exactly what companies are looking for. I didn’t know it at the time, but everything I took at Tech really was pointing a couple of years out, to intersect with where industry is now. To use the Wayne Gretzky quote, I was ‘skating to where the puck was going to be.'"
To those thinking about a data analytics career, Trent advises, “Seriously consider the Georgia Tech OMS Analytics program. I researched other online data analytics master's programs, but I knew the quality and the impact of having Georgia Tech credentials. And, I can testify, it’s never too late.”
Trent concludes, “Sometimes to go further, you have to go back. NASA uses this technique with its deep space probes, orbiting back to Earth for a final gravity boost. I’m thankful to Georgia Tech and OMS Analytics for boosting me to my current voyage – in career and life. It’s a pretty sweet ride.”
Credits
Writer: Laurel-Ann Dooley
Editor: Teresa Daniel
Digital Producer: Kat Bell
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