Mike Thomson, Space Grant Intern 2007-08, worked at General Dynamics C4 Systems until 2013 to help create the fastest military-grade data encryption devices in the world. During that time, he also attended Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which culminated with a Master's degree from Harvard. Mike is now pursuing a Ph.D. in computer architecture and embedded processing from the University of Texas at Austin. His academic research, with his advisor Dr. Derek Chiou, is currently focused on methods for achieving many orders of magnitude speedup in the simulation of complex microprocessors. This simulation speedup is obtained by developing a hybrid software/hardware methodology that connects fast software-based processor functional models with fast and cycle-accurate hardware-based processor timing models (using FPGAs). Despite his limited time due to his graduate studies, Mike also spends as much time as possible with his wife and two sons, to whom he indebted for their patience and understanding!