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Rob Smithson is an author of several publications in the area of motor vehicle transmissions with over 16 years of engineering and management experience in the automotive, aerospace, and robotics fields. Prior to joining Fallbrook, Rob served as the group leader of the Drivetrain Design & Development Group for The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas. Rob's career includes serving as a product development engineer for The Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. He also was Vice President of Robot Design and a co-founder of ARM Automation, Inc., and worked as a spaceflight hardware engineer for the McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics Company. Rob was the first to recognize that the NuVinci variator was kinematically equivalent to a variable ratio planetary gearset, hence the term "Continuously Variable Planetary" or CVP. Rob holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Auburn University and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Additionally, he holds an Executive M.S. in Science & Technology Commercialization (named Kozmetzsky Scholar and Outstanding Graduate) from the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. | 