Team Leader Profile – Mark Heslep
Electrical Engineer Completes the Circuit
Growing up in Richmond, Va., Mark Heslep learned building techniques working summers and weekends with his parents’ residential and commercial construction company.
Initially mostly shoveling or hauling plywood sheets up to a rooftop, “the work was back-breaking. But by late high school and college, I was picking up skills from some really good carpenter crews.”
Now retired after a career developing advanced electronics systems for military and aviation uses, Mark has come full circle—volunteering with us to support homeowners who need assistance maintaining their homes and aging in place.
Like his father—a civil engineering graduate of Virginia Military Institute—Mark attended VMI, majoring in electrical engineering. He then earned a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Virginia in 1985.
Moving to Dallas, he worked for LTV Corp., integrating aerial photography for realistic flight simulators for military pilots, among other projects. When the huge conglomerate struggled financially during an economic downturn in the mid-1980s, Mark moved to Northern Virginia, ultimately joining a friend’s startup company developing radar equipment and technology. “We were constantly solving really hard problems that had to be done fast. I got a big kick out of doing that and learned a tremendous amount,“ he says.
In 1996, he moved to the MITRE Corp., “once again putting electronics into military vehicles” that endure harsh environments, including amphibious tanks for the U.S. Marine Corps. In 2003, he met his wife Catherine. Their oldest son is now studying engineering at Virginia Tech, while another son and daughter are in high school.
Racing on Land and Water
While at MITRE, Mark participated in a competition sponsored by the U.S. Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency to stimulate research and development of self-driving vehicles. The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was a driverless race over a rugged off-road course in California’s Mojave Desert. MITRE’s entry, a pickup truck named Meteor, excelled in preliminary rounds but failed in the final round when dust and debris blew across the course and the truck’s laser sensors could not discern the way to go.
Racing robots isn’t the only type of racing Mark has done. After moving to NoVa, a roommate who had been on the U.S. Olympic rowing team introduced him to that sport. “Right away it piqued my interest and I took some classes and wanted to go further.”
In 1994, a Russian émigré who had been a championship rower and coach of the Soviet Olympic team became a coach at the Capital Rowing Club in Washington, D.C., and began more intensive year-round training for members. The club’s teams steadily improved and started winning medals at national and international competitions. In 2001, Mark’s team won the age 40 and over flight at the FISA World Masters Regatta in Montreal. Mark continues to work out several mornings a week at the club’s D.C. boathouse along the Anacostia River.
After retiring in 2013, Mark first started volunteering with RT-AFF on a National Rebuilding Day team organized by his church. He was later invited to become an RT Express Team Leader when the staff learned about extensive energy-saving improvements he had made to his home. Team leaders do assessments of needed repairs at clients’ homes, prepare work plans, assemble needed supplies and tools, and supervise a team’s work.
Mark advises potential volunteers to “think about what your skills are and then offer them up to your team leader so we can put you on that kind of task. But be adaptable to whatever the leader needs you to do.”
He loves that “you get people with a lot of skills and you orchestrate them with a good plan. And you can accomplish a tremendous amount in five or six hours.
“It’s hard to give money or do charity work where I think you can be sure that you’re really making an impact. But you can clearly see what RT-AFF does is worthwhile and it’s really helping people.”
Links:
2005 DARPA Grand Challenge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005)
MITRE Sponsors Team for the DARPA Grand Challenge ’05
https://web.archive.org/web/20070815133723/http:/www.mitre.org/tech/meteor/
Capital Rowing Club
2001 FISA World Masters Regatta
2001 FISA World Masters Regatta is Honoured in Quebec – World Rowing
