After completing her PhD at Rice University, she got a job at Microanalysis and Design, a brand new firm in Boulder founded by the son of one of Gail’s professors at Rice.  Gail’s speciality was

Human Factors – the study of how humans interact with technology – and the firm

did contracting work with the US Government.  Gail worked on some of the firm’s

biggest projects, including new design work for NASA.  Her colleague at the time,

Chris Plott, recalls that “Gail fit in beautifully. It was her first professional job in our

field after getting her PHD, but you wouldn’t know it.  She was very good at what she

did.” 

 

While Gail was “fitting in beautifully” inside the firm, outside the firm she was a newly

divorced mother of two girls. Taking the position in Boulder had meant moving her two kids from Houston to Colorado and ostensibly becoming a single parent.  

 

“When she moved to Colorado she was very concerned about the girls,” recalls her twin brother Gary.  “She was a mother first, even with such a bright career.”

 

Gail reverted back to a pattern she had established in Houston while earning her PhD with two young kids at home:  reject a choice between kids and career.  Find a way to make both work.

 

Now, in Colorado, this would be put to the test. But her zen approach to life, devotion to her family, and magnetic personality helped her pull it off. Coworkers at Microanalysis were recruited to babysit.  Her brother Wayne, newly graduated from law school, moved to Boulder to be with Gail.  Her mother Ruth made several trips during the first year.

 

Amazingly, Gail was not only making a name for herself at the firm, but continuing to publish and establish her reputation nationally. She collaborated with two other PhDs to write a study entitled, “Isometric Strength Tests: Predicting Performance in Physically Demanding Transport Tasks.”  Not exactly “light reading.”

 

Her time at Microanalysis and Design became the launching point of a busy career in Human Factors Technology.  

 

Two Decades of Work

Because her expertise was in helping companies design technology that was easy and effective for humans to use, Gail went on to work for several companies that required an effective human interface with technology:  US West (telephone company), DirectTV, Jeppesen (aviation navigation) and Quark - an early competitor to Adobe that was automating the publishing process.  

 

Gail had a reputation for being extremely competent and well liked by everyone she worked with.  At US West, she became the leader of a 5 member design team, and at Quark she led a team based in India - where she traveled several times to oversee their work.  

 

                                From her sister Rene’s perspective, “the people she cared about most were her girls. But Gail was                                      also really very into her work.  She worked A LOT and gave so much to her career.  It just wasn’t a                                    part of her life that she’d really share.”

 

                              At US West, she also met Mark Glesner, who would become her second husband.  Mark recalls why                                Gail was in such high demand.

 

“Her speciality was very unique and very important and she was so good at it.  She already had

the ability to deal with people and know how to talk and interact with them so well, and then she

had the expertise to translate it to a computer.  So she would be an advocate for the user and try

to make their job as easy and intuitive as possible.  She was just a natural at it and was very in

demand.”

 

Mark got to see firsthand how much Gail “absolutely loved being a mother” but attests that she was a “a big career woman too - she really made both work.”  In her personal life, Gail often elevated the needs of others above her own.  But her career was a space for her to be ambitious, to exercise her curiosity and flex her intellect.  

 

She never lost that ambition or curiosity, but she lost her ability to exercise it when she developed early-onset Alzheimer’s, sometime in the mid-2000s.  Of all the roles she played – wife, mother, sister – it was her career that became the first casualty of her disease.  By 2010 she was effectively no longer able to do her work, far earlier than she would have chosen to stop.