Rob holds a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering and a master's degree in Industrial Engineering funded through NASA sponsored Aviation Human Factors research. After two decades of employment in the electronics industry, much of it avionics, his engineering career abruptly ended from injuries sustained in a head-on traffic accident. During his time in the manufacturing sector, he watched befuddled as vast swaths of America's electronics industry and technology off-shored to the People's Republic of China. Writing became a vital outlet during post-accident rehabilitation, leveraging a personal interest in defense issues and military-techno fiction to strengthen cognitively. That interest buttressed a multi-year recovery process producing the first of hopefully many novels, Troubled Waters on the South China Sea. During the book's creation, fictional events and scenarios depicted within the book paralleled ensuing real-life events so regularly, forcing manuscript revisions, that the phenomenon became a running family joke.