Amber S. Gell

Gell is the Franklin High graduate who went from hating freshman English to engineering work on NASA's Orion spacecraft. She was born in Milwaukee in 1984 and graduated from Franklin High School in 2002. As a freshman she wanted to be a rocket scientist and did not see the point of literature. Teacher Kevin Nettesheim kept at her. She left for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, stacked bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering and aerospace studies, and added master's work in space systems, physiology, finance, and an MBA before joining Lockheed Martin on Orion: docking, landing and recovery, and propulsion-test papers, including docking-integration work in Houston.

Years later she called Nettesheim out of the blue. "Do you remember me?" "You're the rocket scientist." She had put his name on a satellite and sent it up. WISN covered that exchange when he retired; her alumni note still lists his AP English class as a favorite memory. She received Adler Planetarium's Women in Space Science Award in 2013 and a Presidential Volunteer Service Award in 2016 for STEM outreach. She has judged FIRST Robotics at the Wisconsin Regional since 2008. Later she became director of strategy and partnerships at Kongsberg Satellite Services in Norway.

Wikipedia still says Milwaukee native. The English classroom that redirected her was in Franklin. Birth is the hospital city; the raise and the high-school chapter that produced the engineer are Franklin's.