On Memorial Day, I always remember my maternal grandfather, Captain Edward F. Zimmerman, MD, USN, who served on the USS Shasta during World War II. Thoughts of him are usually accompanied by a twinge of regret that I didn't follow in his footsteps in naval service, a career decision I am still trying to "atone" for. So this Memorial Day weekend, the words of Under Secretary of Defense John Young, Jr., who spoke at Georgia Tech last Friday morning, were welcome and reassuring.

Secretary Young, a Georgia Tech aerospace engineering alumnus, returned to his alma mater last week and took some time to address an audience of students and faculty on "The Value of Public Service for the Scientist and Engineer." As the Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Young is responsible for advising Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on all technological and logistics matters relating to the research, development, acquisition and deployment of vital tools to our military personnel. He began his civil service career as an AIAA Congressional Fellow, leaving Sandia National Laboratory to work for the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and later moving over to the Department of Defense.

Young described the profound reward and satisfaction of contributing to the major decisions that affect our nation's prosperity and security and urged Georgia Tech students to consider bringing their technical skills to the public policy table. The same analytical skills required for an engineering trade study, where a compromise between two competing variables must be made, are applicable and vital to the decisions of government, he said. When I asked him if an engineer has any particular ability to defuse partisan rancor in order to make a legislative decision, he explained that two senators who might be blood enemies on one issue can see eye-to-eye on another; it is the responsibility of an engineer, as always, to bring the appropriate tools to a given job at hand, thus finding the right two legislators to bring together.

One of his most recent jobs for the Secretary of Defense was especially rewarding and arguably as important to our soldiers in the field as any decision made in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last Summer, the need to ramp up acquisition and deployment of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles became the highest priority of the Department of Defense after significant pressure was applied by Congress. These MRAP vehicles are designed specifically to resist the blasts of roadside mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are a constant threat in the current conflicts, and they can reduce casualties from IEDs by as much as 80 percent. Young was appointed by the Secretary of Defense to head a task force in charge of spooling up our nation's capacity to build and deploy the MRAPs as quickly as possible. During Friday's lecture, he became visibly emotional as he described the moment when, faced with daunting logistics challenges, Secretary Gates told him bluntly, "Get it done." The task force did get it done, and MRAPs are now saving lives in the field. This fact hit home for Young in an even more emotional moment when a Georgia Tech professor in the audience -- Young's undergraduate co-op advisor -- thanked him for his effort, since his son is now an MRAP driver in Afghanistan. Knowing that he is in an MRAP instead of a Humvee helps Young's former mentor sleep easier at night.

These are the kinds of policy decisions I hope to influence in my future, as I prepare to leave a decade of purely technical research for a career in civil service. I have always had a liberal arts side to my academic pursuits and a keen interest in politics, so such a career choice is not entirely surprising. But I also often wonder if I partly hope that serving my country as a civil servant will assuage that twinge of guilt I feel when I remember my grandfather -- and my father, a surviving veteran of the Korean War, his step-father and three of my uncles who also served. If I serve this nation in a manner that contributes to her security, even if not through service in uniform, will I be able to honor the military tradition of my family?

I joined the Navy ROTC as a freshman in college, a decision my grandfather supported, with the intent of getting into flight school and ultimately, perhaps, becoming an astronaut. By my sophomore year, new academic discoveries changed my career interests a bit, and those interests no longer seemed compatible with the path my battalion had me on. I decided to leave ROTC and prepare for a career that contributed to our country's defense in less direct, more intellectual ways -- a decision my grandfather also supported. In a time of peace like it was, the decision did not seem so momentous; but now in a time of war, it is hard not to wonder if I just "chickened out." And it is hard to remember the service of my father and grandfather without wanting to live that down.

With a little luck and a lot of determination, I hope one day I can do something as important for our men and women in uniform as deploying the MRAPs more quickly like Under Secretary Young did. If you are a scientist or engineer contemplating the same career move, there are Congressional Fellowships and other civil service opportunities for everyone from physicists, electrical engineers, materials scientists, mechanical engineers, chemists,civil engineers, and many other disciplines as well through the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Suit up and get your nerd on, your country is calling.