Dr. Van Hilst entered academia after an extensive career in industry. He worked for 10 years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where, as senior architect, he worked on NASA's Einstein, Hubble, and Chandra space telescopes. He also worked at IBM Research, for the French CNRS, and at HP Labs, where he was a member of the Software Technology Lab. While at FAU, he consulted for Motorola, over many years, on improving their development processes. Dr. Van Hilst has two bachelors and a masters degree from MIT. He did his PhD at the University of Washington under David Notkin.