Christine De Zeeuw descends from a family line filled with engineers, educators and other kinds of logical thinkers and problem solvers. Her father, an aerospace engineer, and her mother, a math teacher, were some of the biggest influences on her. She was also inspired by myriad relatives, such as aunts and uncles who worked in engineering and related fields. With this influence, Ms. De Zeeuw decided to pursue the field in college and see if it was a good fit for her, and it was. In this respect, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts from Calvin College. Upon graduation, she began working at SeaLandAire Technologies, Inc. The company produces such products as hydrophones, moored acoustic reference systems, the PUMA surface vehicle and low drag floats and has many other projects in development. In addition, she is a designer and tester of circuit boards for defense applications for marine research and a designer and tester of sonobuoys.
Ms. De Zeeuw attributes her success to determination, wanting to get the work done and having the drive to do it without someone having to tell her. She also attributes it to her problem-solving and creative thinking skills, which have helped her work around and troubleshoot issues. Ms. De Zeeuw has had to think outside the zone many times throughout her career. A highlight of Ms. De Zeeuw’s career was when she went on her first off-site field test on a naval base on San Clemente Island in San Diego, California. She was able to go along and test the hardware she had been working on for a long time, put all the pieces together and actually see it function in the field. It was satisfying for Ms. De Zeeuw to see the culmination of all her hard work.
Looking toward the future, Ms. De Zeeuw hopes to take on more leadership roles on certain projects. While she finds it easy to design her own system, work on one little piece, and send it off for someone else to put it in the system, but she sees herself being more involved in the process of managing, and being part of the system as a whole, instead of only working on one specialized piece. Ms. De Zeeuw endeavors to take on additional responsibility and to increase her knowledge of those areas while gaining the ability to talk about and understand them better.
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