Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Jessie works as a software engineer at Aurora and focuses on simulation, which describes as “building a video game that a self-driving car operates in, so the car is absolutely safe when it gets on the road.” Prior to Aurora, she worked as a software engineer at Uber’s autonomous unit and at Flight Research Aerospace. As a research assistant at the University of Nevada, Reno, she designed and developed a fully-functional forest fire simulator. This grew out of her graduate thesis, which was in parallel computation and focused on the simulation of forest fires using CUDA. During graduate school, she taught high school science two days a week.