Tracy Drain

Oh, my gosh.

Absolutely.

And I didn't even know until I was much older.

I had an opportunity to meet Lieutenant Uhura, Nichelle Nichols.

She came to the lab.

That's one of the benefits of working at a place like that in 2016.

And she told me this story, and I told my mom, who told me another story, which blew me away.

So...

So Nichelle Nichols told me that she, after the first season of the original Star Trek, was going to leave the show.

And then she met Dr. Martin Luther King, who essentially, I'm paraphrasing, said, are you crazy?

You have no idea how important you are.

to have kids all across the country see an African-American woman in this really key role on this amazing TV show.

And so she decided to stay.

I told my mom this, and my mom said that one of the reasons that she even is interested in science fiction is that their older sister, Juanita, looks a lot like...

Lieutenant Uhura.

And so they would rush home to watch the show, and that's what got her interested in Star Trek in the first place.

And the reason that she watched, or the fact that she watched Star Trek and Star Wars and all the things, she passed that along to me and my brother.

That's why I'm interested in this, and that's essentially why I have the job that I do today.

There are so many strokes of luck for me.

I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Kentucky.