Away from the office, Tom and his wife are busy with their two children, juggling homework, soccer, piano lessons, and other extracurricular activities.

***********************

Tom Braun joined our staff in 1993 after his brother, Michael Braun (also an engineer on our staff), lured him away from his position as a senior development engineer working in the aerospace industry. While Tom enjoyed the southern California life-style and the work he was doing in the aerospace industry, his decision to relocate to the Bay Area and join our staff was an easy one. "I grew up in Livermore, and my family is all still here in the Livermore Valley. I had always hoped to return to this area at some point, and when the opportunity to join Boster, Kobayashi & Associates came along, I jumped at the chance. The field of forensic engineering sounded interesting and challenging. It has turned out to be everything that I had hoped it would be and then some. The work continually presents new and challenging problems."

After graduating from Livermore High School, Tom attended the University of California at Davis to double major in both Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering. "I have always had a love for airplanes, boats, cars, and mechanical things in general. The double major gave me the opportunity to pursue those passions while obtaining a broad and diverse background in engineering. I didn’t realize at the time that I would end up applying my skills to analyzing and understanding how and why cars crash and things break or fail. I was dreaming about designing supersonic airplanes or electric cars or something." While at UC Davis, Tom received scholarships from the Engineering Council of the Sacramento Valley and Shell Oil based on his academic achievement.

He graduated with highest honors, receiving his degree in 1987. He was awarded a Departmental Citation in recognition of outstanding undergraduate accomplishment in Mechanical Engineering and the College of Engineering Medal. Tom is also a member of Tau Beta Pi, a national engineering honor society.

While attending UC Davis, Tom worked for three summers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Two of those summers, Tom was awarded an Honors Undergraduate Fellowship to participate in and conduct scientific research. The third summer Tom joined the Mechanical Engineering Department as an engineering assistant and completed several projects in support of work being done at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab.

After graduation, Tom joined Allied Signal Aerospace Company as a development engineer in the Mechanical Actuation Systems Group. Tom worked on mechanical, electromechanical, and hydraulic systems for the commercial and military aircraft market as well as the international space station program. "I have found that my education and training in mechanical and aeronautical engineering, combined with my practical experience in design, development, analysis, testing, reliability, safety and manufacturing, have been well suited to the accident reconstruction and forensic engineering work I do now. I think the work that I’m doing today is actually far more interesting than what I had imagined I’d be doing at this point in my career."