Dr AnnMarie Oien graduated from Otago with a physics PhD in 1996 and after working in Colorado helping develop lasers, in 2007 she took a position at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, an $US8 billion-a-year-revenue company.
She told the story at a lecture at Otago University yesterday and shared some tips about adjusting to life in United States.
These tips included adjusting to left-hand drive vehicles, something which took her many years to achieve.
''Approach your car slowly and peer in to see where the steering wheel is before getting in.''
Many of her successes came as a result of looking at what were seemingly failures, as opportunities.
She got a job for a Colorado research company in 1997 after unsuccessfully applying for a lectureship at Otago University and secured a position at Lockheed Martin Space Systems after a $50 million research proposal was turned down.
Her job title now was ''lead of lean six sigma'', which involved finding ways to identify and eliminate waste and reduce defects.
This involved identifying the process by which products are made, which was an important role, because the company was expected to become more efficient each time it fulfilled new contracts.
''We build the GPS navigation satellites and we build not just one, but a constellation of five or six and the Government sets up a contract expecting what they call a `learning curve', which means that we have to get cheaper and better each time we build one of these things,'' she said.
Dr Oien also spoke about her role as secretary of the Alumni of University of Otago America Inc and encouraged graduates who shifted to the United States to become members.
