Debra Elkins: I took a lot of classes in math, computer science, physics, and chemistry, and finally realized I liked sport computing and slick mathematics applied to real world industrial problems. I ended up in Operations Research, which lets me combine my interests in probability, super computing and high performance computing, simulation, and so forth. As a graduate student in the Industrial Engineering/Operations Research Program at Texas A&M University, I found out about working at GM R&D when I was at a technical conference. I decided to interview out of curiosity. I was really surprised and delighted with the people and the caliber of research going on within GM. My first major research project was to explore financial implications of agile machining systems for GM. While working on that project, I was poking around in risk analysis work, and connected with GM Corporate Risk Management, a group that wanted some help with probabilistic modeling of risks. Now I?m working on strategic supply chain risk analysis. I?m examining how to model the GM manufacturing enterprise, exploring the frequency and severity of business interruption events? anything that interrupts production operations?and considering strategic mitigation options that can reduce GM?s risk exposure. What excites me about my research is combining ideas from different subject areas, like math, computer science, statistics, and operations research, to develop novel modeling approaches and solutions for large-scale problems.