February Dinner Meeting: Effective Communications for Successful Programs (This Page)

Effective communications between engineers, customers, and scientific users are essential in today’s working environment. Our March Dinner Meeting will feature two speakers covering the topic of Effective Communications, Ann Catherine Dickson and Judith Love Cohen.

The dreams and visions of the scientist and engineer can only come to fruition if there is a buyer, and the financial and program support is effective. In today’s world of shrinking budgets, avid competition and increased customer oversight, it is more important than ever to propose, negotiate and manage the contract successfully. The "Mutuality of Expectation" of the contractor and the customer must be clearly understood and documented in detail. The dynamic nature of today’s large aerospace programs demand "eternal vigilance" and the occasional "mid course" correction. The challenge has never been greater. Ms. Dickson will be discussing her experiences in preparing winning proposals, successful negotiation techniques, and effective contract management, giving the customers a successful product while allowing the contractors a reasonable profit. Some case histories and lessons learned will be discussed.

Ann Catherine Dickson is an alumnus of UCLA and recipient of their Graduate Certificate in Government Contract Administration. She is a past chairman of the AIAA L.A. Section and was on the National Board of Directors for twelve years. She is a Fellow of the National Contract Management Association and past chairman of the L.A. South Bay Section. She has held numerous positions at TRW, most recently as Division Contracts Manager of Federal Systems Division. Previously associated with DSP, TDRSS, GRO (Compton Observatory), AXAF (Chandra) and was a Member to the Technical Staff at Aerospace Corporation on Titan III. She was also the recipient of TRW’s first Woman of Achievement Award and is in Who’s Who of American Women. She presently resides in San Clemente, recently completing their Civic Leadership Course, and enjoying golf and sailing. She has three grown children, including a daughter who is a registered professional engineer of California.

The Hubble Space Telescope had a number of subcontractors, including the Aura Corporation who were to be the science users of the science users of the Space Telescope. This meant that the users could approve or disapprove the design and work together with the other subcontractors to provide user expertise. This gave TRW a unique opportunity to work together with the astronomers who were designing the planning, real-time operation and post processing uses to design a user-engineered system. Judith Love Cohen will be speaking about her experiences as a system engineer for the Science Operations Ground Station (SOGS) for the Hubble Space Telescope. She will also speak on her work on books and CD-ROMs used to encourage girls to study science as this work gave her an opportunity to work with the users after the SOGS system was built. This portion of the talk will be illustrated with slides and videos supplied by the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, produced with the help of SOGS.

Judith Love Cohen is a Registered Professional Electrical Engineer in the State of California. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Engineering from the University of Southern California thirty years ago. Judith worked for TRW on NASA projects such as the Lunar Excursion Module (part of the Apollo program), and the Hubble Space Telescope. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, such as the Outstanding Engineer Award from the Institute for the Advancement of Engineering, and has been listed in Who’s Who in the West and Who’s Who in American Women. She also raised four children; one of them is now an engineer and VP at TRW. Her hobbies include hiking, folk dancing, and writing. She became interested in encouraging girls to study engineering while active in the Society of Women Engineers. The same thinking led her to write a series of children’s books. You Can Be A Woman Engineer for 3rd to 6th grade girls was her first book. She has now done 12 books in English, 7 in Spanish Translation and four CD-ROMs.