Kathy Rose Center

Kathy Rose Center didn't plan to become an actor. Fueled by a steady diet of sci-fi novels in her youth, she harbored dreams of becoming an astronaut. In 1968, a regional science fair competition won her a seat at the premier screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey" at the Cinerama Theater in Houston, a tour of NASA, and lunch with astronaut Vance Brand. In 1972, she earned her degree in Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics from the University of Texas at Austin. Then life intervened. She was the first woman engineer to be hired into the new product development lab at IBM in Austin, and continued to break new ground over the next 30 years in a variety of technical and project management roles. In 1993, for example, she published a series of papers on business process reengineering, represented IBM at several workflow technology conferences, and was cited in The Economist. In 2002, she took an early retirement to pursue new interests, to travel and take a myriad of classes: horse