Comments from Customers

On Leadership

"I put Wendy in any situation and she makes it better. " - Dr. J. O'Donnell, Branch Chief & Supervisor

"As the Lead Systems Engineer, Wendy is technically strong and incredibly practical. Her direct, no-nonsense communication paired with her good humor makes high-stress situations significantly easier to navigate.  She demonstrates and insists on courteous and cooperative interactions across the team.  Wendy displays a high degree of honesty, loyalty and integrity leading a team of (40+ systems engineers, 300+ engineers) diverse personalities, acting as universal translator between different discipline and communication styles, helping the team hear each other.  She shows concern for the welfare and success of the team, and builds loyalty across the team by managing interpersonal conflict resolution, providing negative feedback when necessary while tempering the feedback with actionable suggestions. Her expectations are always exceedingly clear – and she holds our team to a standard of excellence which manifests in technical success.”  – M. Bock, Project Payload Technical Lead and Systems Engineer 

“While serving as Division Chief Engineer, Wendy’s performance was superb in all phases (technical, communications both orally and written, teamwork, people skills, accessibility to employees, trust). She hit the ground running and got up the learning curve very quickly. After Wendy was here for a month, it felt like she had been here for a year. She fit in so well with the Senior Leadership Team and quickly gained the respect and trust of the division employees.” - Dr. P. Maymon, Division Chief

 “Wendy can look across the project and see where small issues will are putting major engineering milestones at risk. For example, her technical management should be credited with redirecting resources for the simulation team to move it from a path of failure to a path to success. She identified the team's struggles and made as swift but difficult decision to pull a key lead away from his assigned duties to take over the sim team.” –G. Meadows, Project Deputy Systems Engineering Lead & Systems Engineer

 On Technical Expertise

“The Mission Systems Engineering team and, specifically, its leader Wendy Morgenstern, have demonstrated excellent work since the last milestone review.  This is hugely complex with 16 subsystems and large numbers of expensive and challenging hardware and software items; this is being handled by a world-class system engineering team.” – Dr. T. Hyde, Chief Engineer, NASA GSFC

“When the primary instrument for our +$4 billion flagship astrophysics mission exhibited unacceptable performance, the project recruited Wendy as an independent authority to chair the anomaly review board (ARB).  Wendy worked tirelessly to lead a large and diverse team to understand the anomalies, develop and correlate models that reproduced the problem, rapidly trade possible solutions, and develop the best concepts to flight maturity. Most impressively, rework was performed 47 days from the anomaly investigation charter to integrating corrected flight hardware, and over the holidays to boot!

"Wendy led by example doing much of the heavy lifting of the ARB herself while simultaneously setting clear expectations and coordination of the subject matter experts. She conducted meetings constructively and efficiently. She communicated the status and actions to the team and to the science and Project stakeholders effectively and in a timely manner. Her leadership was exemplary. This will have an enormous positive impact on the science efficiency and literally makes possible some scientific investigations that would have otherwise been impossible.” – A. Whipple, Instrument Manager and Systems Engineer

On Mentoring

“Wendy maintains one of the most consistent open-door policies that I’ve seen.  No matter how hectic her schedule, Wendy always makes the time for mentoring moments.  She offers sage advice and honest feedback on how to navigate the portions of this job that aren’t taught in school. She has empowered me for success and built my confidence in ways that I’d have never anticipated. I know that I am one of many who have had such an experience."  – M. Bock, Project Payload Technical Lead and Systems Engineer