Biography

Ashley Sayed is a Systems Engineer with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and 15 years of experience in the defense industry, primarily in satellite mission payloads. Her passions include plant-based nutrition, fitness, a healthy, active lifestyle, and dominating complex problem spaces.

After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2008, Ashley began her career in the Software Engineering field. Her software experience includes writing embedded reprogramming software for missiles, built in test (BIT) software for aircraft flight management systems, and specialized test equipment (STE) software for satellite payload testing. She has experience in the C, C++, and ADA programming languages.

Upon realizing her love of the big picture and how subsystems can be architected together into a more meaningful whole, Ashley migrated into Systems Engineering. Her systems experience spans the entire lifecycle from study to design to requirements development to integration and test to verification and validation to post-delivery support. Her specialty is new business, where she can explore, analyze, and propose solutions for previously uncharted problem spaces. She is proficient in the Systems Tool Kit (STK) and Matlab modeling/analysis tools, and in DOORS requirements management. She is a graduate of the Systems Engineering Architect Leadership (SEAL) program through General Dynamics Mission Systems, class of 2020. She holds a graduate certificate in Systems Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology, class of 2021.

Ashley is the author of "Honey Badger: A Relentless Engineer's Unconventional Treatise on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," which details how she solved and cured her case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) using a Systems Engineering black box troubleshooting approach. She hopes that her story will help legitimize mystery illnesses like CFS, and inspire others to challenge and overcome their mystery illnesses as well.

When she is not solving problems or writing books, Ashley enjoys cooking, hiking, spinning, running, dogs, Arizona sunsets, the show Fixer Upper, and the movie Ratatouille!