“Any dream is attainable with enough work, effort and time,” says young Jordanian engineer and Crown Prince Foundation (CPF) participant, Khaled Al Sharif, who recently got a job in California with the US space agency, NASA.
Khaled is now serving as a robotics engineer for the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) in NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, which explores extreme environments, remote locations and uncharted worlds with missions in computer vision, geo-spatial data systems, human-robot interaction, planetary mapping and robot software.
The young Jordanian's journey at NASA traces back to 2016, when the Crown Prince Foundation selected him as one of the 12 outstanding students to be sent to the Ames Research Centre for an internship. NASA’s first partnership with an Arab country, the internship program, provides Jordan’s top engineering students from universities across the Kingdom with the opportunity to conduct practical, hands-on research at the US space agency.
Khaled got his second opportunity with the US space agency in September 2017, when he was awarded the first place at the NASA Europa Challenge 2017 competition along with communications engineer Farah Salah.
The winning application, World Weather, enabled scientists, meteorologists and the general public interested in weather related topics to create three-dimensional and four-dimensional images using weather data from different sources.
Khaled expressed his gratitude for CPF for its sponsorship of his internship at NASA. The young engineer went on to encourage “every aspiring Jordanian dreamer” to contact the Foundation and participate in its many initiatives.
Reflecting on his journey, Khaled elaborated on the words of the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, saying “The world around you and the tools you use every day — all of it has been designed and built by people no smarter than yourself. They are just people that worked a little harder on themselves.”
