The Palo Alto Unified School District recently hired a new robotics coach and engineering teacher to follow in the steps of the current robotics coach, who is set to retire after this year.

Chris Kuszmaul will replace the retiring Doug Bertain as the coach of Palo Alto High School’s Robotics team and will also teach new computer science and engineering classes at Paly.

“I will be teaching computer science and engineering classes,” Kuszmaul said. “We are working now to define them, although our default assumption is that I will teach the same material as Josh Paley has taught at Gunn.”

Kuszmaul earned a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters degree in the same field at The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

He was the Senior Research Scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Advanced Supercomputer facility at Ames research center for about 10 years.

“I led the team that wrote the technical specification for all computer science research and development at Ames in the early 2000s,” Kuszmaul said.

Along with research at NASA, Kuszmaul worked for some startup companies specializing in designing supercomputers, writing security software, or performing internet search.

In the field of robotics, Kuszmaul has experience teaching FIRST LEGO League and Botball at the Harker Summer Institute and FIRST Robotics Competition at Mountain View High School.  The Paly robotics team is an FRC team.

FLL, Botball and FRC are different types of robotics activites, according to Kuszmaul.

“FRC robots are big, fast and just generally awesome,” Kuszmaul said. “FRC is the big leagues.”

Kuszmaul is excited to coach the Paly robotics team and has already attended two Paly team meetings.

“I am really pleased to see that I can be of help to the team,” Kuszmaul said. “I do not know how much of what I want to do we can implement in the first year — much of what needs to happen will take years to learn as a group.”