My Responsibilities and Daily Activities

by Kenneth A. Souza
DATE: 08/08/96

"Troubleshooting"

I am really a trouble shooter. I am responsible for interacting with the Life Science Program Office at NASA Headquarters, with the program managers here at Ames, as well as the local management. So on any given day, what typically happens is that I'll have a set of meetings that may take up half of a day. Those meetings range from one-on-one meetings to full-fledged review meetings. In one-on-one meetings, I'm listening to a person tell me about their particular program and the problems they're having meeting schedules, budgets, or new ideas for a scientific capability, whether it's a new instrument or a new mission. In review meetings, I'm reviewing a big program like all of our equipment that's going to be put on a particular shuttle mission or sent up to the Mir space station.

Animal Care

I have responsibility for the animal care and use program here at Ames. So, I want to make sure that people are adhering to the appropriate laws and regulations. There is a very distinct process for doing that.

International Programs

We have a lot of international programs. I probably go to six international meetings a year, in which we're trying to coordinate our activities with our international partners--the European Space Agency, the Russian Space Agency, the Japanese, Canadian, and many more--and set goals for new activities.

My Daily Activities: Daily Problems, the Press, the Electronic Media

Coping with Daily Problems

Some of my days are taken up in advance-planning activities, budgetary problems, mission scheduling or scientific problems, some personnel problems and, of course, incessant email and telephone calls that come from a variety of sources. All of this rounds out a very long day.

Interaction with the Press

Interaction with the press is quite typical. Yesterday, it was exobiology, of which I am not directly involved. A few weeks ago it was the use of our animals on the Russian biosatellite. The animal rights people are very much involved with reviewing our program, and that takes a lot of my time channeling that activity. Space station budget cuts and potential problems there is another activity. That was today's crisis.

Frustrations with the Electronic Media

It's unfortunate that in some ways, the electronic media has taken hold because it's requiring instant gratification, and it has just made my life miserable by my being the neck of an hour glass. I get this deluge of information from NASA Hqs. that wants instantaneous response, and having to channel that out to the technical people at Ames, who can provide analytical capabilities and responses back to Hqs., and then having to channel the information back to Hqs. I just can't keep up with the electronic mail, for example. I typically receive between 50 and 60 email messages a day, along with about a dozen phone calls, and four or five meetings of an hour or two and length. I don't lack things to do.