Biographical Summary

Dreams of one day becoming an astronaut took root at age 7, when Vandebroek watched the moon landing on her grandmother's television in her native Belgium. Her dream took a slight detour when she instead became an engineer. Today, she worries that too few kids in the United States understand the importance, value, and excitement of such a career. To stoke that interest, she speaks on college campuses and has taken an active role in judging a national competition for inventors between the ages of 10 and 17. After briefly working as a Research Assistant at the Belgian National Science Foundation and then as a Reseacher at IBM, she joined Xerox's Innovation Group at its Research Center in Canada in 1991. She was appointed Chief Technology Officer and President of the Innovation Group at Xerox in 2006.