Team Leader Profile – Mark Scherger
Childhood Curiosity Sparked a Career
Mark Scherger showed an early aptitude for electrical engineering long before earning a bachelor’s degree in the field.
His older brother—who became a chemical engineer—had chemistry sets Mark played with, “but I always migrated toward electrical things,” Mark recalls. At age 8, he tapped his home’s phone just to see if he could do it.
The Rebuilding Together-AFF team leader credits his father, a dedicated do-it-yourselfer, and grandfather, a self-taught electrician who installed railroad signals, for inspiring his curiosity about how things work.
That scientific mind and curiosity served well in the family’s specialty dry-cleaning business in Toledo, Ohio. As a child, he surprised his father by maximizing the number of feather pillows he could clean per hour by disassembling them, sterilizing the feathers with ultraviolet light, and resewing them inside new ticking.
After graduating from the University of Dayton in 1983, Mark began his career with General Electric Aerospace in Valley Forge, Pa., working with classified satellite simulations and performance modeling for military contracts. Over 38 years, Mark’s drive and curiosity led to numerous roles in systems engineering, program management, contract evaluation and executive leadership as Martin Marietta bought GE Aerospace in 1993, then merged with Lockheed in 1995 to create Lockheed Martin.
In 1992, he was transferred to Northern Virginia to start a technical analysis and evaluation center for the federal intelligence community, growing it to 40 employees within two years.
In later roles focused on IT networks and data management, he transitioned more than 30,000 Lockheed Martin managers and executives from company-supplied BlackBerrys to iPhones. And when Lockheed acquired Sikorsky Aircraft in 2015, Mark led the integration of its workforce into Lockheed’s IT and collaboration networks.
Taking flight
In addition to electricity, another passion was sparked in childhood when a family friend took Mark on his first flight in a Cessna. He earned his pilot’s license in 1986 and later bought a four-seat, 1963 Mooney airplane, which he now keeps at the Warrenton-Fauquier Airport in Virginia.
Mark takes practice flights once or twice a month, and over the years, has flown his plane to visit family members in Texas, Maine, North Carolina, Florida, and Illinois. Longer flights require a stop at small, rural airports to refuel. “I pull up to the fuel pump, swipe my credit card, and fill up my tank,” just like stopping for gas in a car.
After retiring in 2021, Mark enjoyed helping his wife Erin, a yoga teacher and wellness coach, demonstrate stretches and exercises in a series of YouTube videos. After finishing some home renovations, he volunteered for RT-AFF in 2022. He was soon asked to be one of the team leaders who assess needed repairs at clients’ homes, prepare work plans, assemble needed supplies and tools, and supervise volunteer team’s work. In 2025 he joined the Board of Directors.
Mark appreciates RT-AFF’s flexibility of volunteering and the opportunity to apply his project management experience while learning new skills. His most memorable project was installing a stairlift for a disabled homeowner who slept in the living room and was unable go upstairs for two years. “He got on that stairlift and got to the top and you could see the emotion because he could now get to his upstairs and take a bath.”
Mark encourages potential volunteers: “Just do it. I have never left a job and not felt good. When you’re fixing something that somebody really needs, it’s a great feeling.”
Links:
Mooney airplanes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooney_M20#1960s
Yoga with Mark
https://www.youtube.com/@mindfulnudges/videos
RT-AFF Board of Directors
https://rebuildingtogether-aff.org/who-we-are/our-team/
