Personal Stories

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue2 1–31 March 2020

Shanae King grew up in Townsville, North Queensland. A family-owned IT business saw her develop an interest in website and graphic design at the age of eight. Alongside her growing interest in science and technology, she also pursued a number of varying passions including visual art, piano and representative netball. Hoping to eventually work in the space industry, she applied to ANU and was awarded a scholarship to study a Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Science in 2010.

During University, Shanae specialized in mechatronics engineering, while in science, her focus shifted from astrophysics to computer science in later years. As a final year highlight, she travelled to Geelong to compete in an Autonomous Ground Vehicle Competition, sporting an outdoor robot she and two of her peers built in a home garage. Despite what she describes as a “less-than-conventional” approach to the construction of their robot, their design took home the Innovation Award.

After graduating in 2014, she worked in Defence as a software engineer for Lockheed Martin, before moving to Liquid Instruments, one of ANU’s own technology start-ups. This role had her developing application and embedded software for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based instrumentation. Much of her time was spent exhibiting, training and providing technical support to customers in the US, primarily in the optics and photonics industry. In July 2018, Shanae joined RSAA as an Instrumentation Engineer, where her focus is in FPGA system design for the Emu space-based detector controller.

These days her interests outside work include yoga, cooking and reading (mostly science fiction!).