Reaching for the sky

By MURRAY WILLIAMS

Karen Wilcox wanted to be an astronaut when she was young and the expatriate New Zealander, who works in the United States at one of the world's top technical universities, has never outgrown her childhood dream.

Willcox, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), pursues her dream for now by teaching there and working as a consultant for Boeing and Nasa.

It is a long way from Lincoln Heights primary school in West Auckland and Willcox would like to think her journey is the epitome of the old "girls can do anything" campaign and might encourage brainy young women to consider the sciences instead of more traditional careers.

"When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut and I never really grew out of it, but my mother really wanted me to be a lawyer," she says. "When I said I was doing engineering she asked me whether I should buy overalls and a toolbox."

Willcox would jump at the chance of a trip on the space shuttle, but only American citizens can be astronauts and relinquishing her New Zealand citizenship is too high a price.

"It's still a dream though," she says. "Maybe if you could have dual citizenship ... but I don't know if I would make it very far [through the selection process]."

In the meantime, she has more than enough to do teaching, working with Boeing in Long Beach, California, on its revolutionary Blended-Wing-Body concept aircraft, and with Nasa in Langley, Virginia, on aircraft noise.

"One of [Nasa's] major goals is reducing the level of noise when an aircraft is landing - what you hear is about half airframe flaps, landing gear and so on and about half engine."

The road to MIT, Nasa and Boeing began with a love of maths and science, but Willcox, 29, enjoys languages too - her knowledge of Latin is helping her to learn Afrikaans, her husband's first language.

The former St Cuthbert's College student says she had no idea what she wanted to do until her seventh-form year when two former pupils spoke to a school assembly about their careers as engineers.

After their talk - something she is to emulate on July 26 after addressing the Royal Aeronautic Society annual meeting in Auckland on July 24 - she realised being an engineer did not have to mean wielding tools or building bridges, so she enrolled at Auckland University in 1990 and graduated a bachelor of engineering in 1993.

"I was still really interested in planes and space engineering and when I was halfway through I still had no idea what I wanted to do. So I thought, 'why not go to graduate school?' and I applied for Caltech, Stanford and MIT."

There are no oak trees or ivy-covered walls outside Willcox's cramped office at MIT, which backs onto an industrial area of Cambridge.

Her spartan building, which houses a number of research groups, including the Centres for Space Research and Space Engineering, looks as if it belongs in an industrial estate, not on the campus of the top school for teachers and students of aerospace engineering.

After completing her PhD at MIT in 1999, Willcox spent a year at Boeing working on the Blended-Wing-Body, a futuristic aircraft originally developed by McDonnell Douglas.

The concept, in which she retains a working interest, is smoother, more space efficient and generates more lift because one giant wing replaces traditional wings and fuselage. Smaller versions would carry up to 250 passengers and the largest up to 800. Some say it could be flying in about 10 years, in competition with the giant Airbus A380. However, after leaving an interview with jet engine manufacturers Pratt and Whitney and thinking she could not imagine herself in industry for the rest of her life, Willcox decided teaching would be more rewarding, professionally, if not financially. "You can make a lot more money in industry," she says. "But academia is much more flexible and I'm still working closely with industry."

Other colleagues work with industry. MIT has close links with defence contractors trying to build better laser-guided bombs and missiles, but Willcox says she prefers not to think about that aspect. "I'm not involved in any of it and I don't want to be."

She says her job is fantastic and her students amazing, though she was terrified someone would ask a question and she would not know the answer. If those doubts still linger, Willcox' confidence disguises them well, but she admits to being a little sad that her time in the US is also disguising her background as she loses her antipodean vowels.

"My first six months here were awful," she says. "It was like you needed a translator. My roommate asked me what my first language was and I had to start speaking a lot more slowly and try to enunciate more clearly. I can hear the American in my voice. And it does upset me when I come home and people ask me where I am from in the US."

Willcox, now married to South African engineering student Jaco Pretorius, says sometimes thoughts turn to the prospect of a permanent return. The couple's apartment has a view but there are no evergreen trees in the backyard and it is a long way to the nearest beach.

"We're really happy with it, but everybody lives on top of everybody here, nobody has a backyard and the streets are dirty," she says. Despite that, Willcox loves Boston and Cambridge's compact size, cultural diversity and ethnic foods - and the opportunity to have contact with Boeing and Nasa.

While Willcox says it is probably not realistic to expect New Zealand to be able to retain talents such as hers, she suggests governments could do more to ensure education is well enough funded to make expatriates think seriously of returning. "I'd consider going back to Auckland if I was sure there was still a good school of engineering there."

If the emotional tug of mountain tracks and pohutukawa-shaded beaches ever overcomes the professional satisfaction of working at MIT, Willcox says she would also like to be a secondary teacher. "I had some great teachers at Lincoln Heights: Peter Dreaver, who's just retired and Mr Denny. I should write to them and say thank you," she says. "Mrs McGregor-Reid, my calculus teacher [at St Cuthbert's] was amazing. I look back now and realise how good she was. She must have loved teaching - she wasn't doing it for the money."