Dr. Ben A. Black is a Marketing Development Manager for Power Electronics Real-Time Test at National Instruments and a Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D.in 2007 from the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focused in the use of passive haptic robotics for teleoperation. From 2007 through 2012, he worked as a System Engineer at National Instruments focusing on advanced control and advanced simulation projects. In that work, he has functioned as a consultant both internally and externally to assist with large customers and high-priority projects, mainly in the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for high speed simulation and high speed control. He has worked on interesting projects that have been as mission critical as a three-phase inverter controller for generating a micro-grid or an FPGA-based simulation of a permanent magnet synchronous machine using FEA-based look up tables for the model parameters and as entertaining as an FPGA-controlled home brewery that sat on the Expo Floor of NI Week 2012. He also dedicates a significant amount of time to volunteer as an Executive Committee Member of the Central Texas FIRST LEGO League where he oversees and facilitates the judging for 1500+ elementary students that take part in the regional competitions.