In 1989, Mary (Missy) Cummings landed a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier for the first time. But the young pilot's elation did not last long. Minutes later, a close friend died while attempting the same landing.

Although the U.S. Navy never determined what caused that crash on the USS Lexington in the Gulf of Mexico, Cummings suspects that technology played a role. "I can't tell you how many friends died because of bad designs," she recalls of her years in the military. "As a pilot, I found it incredibly frustrating to work with technology that didn't work with me." That's one of the reasons why, after more than a decade behind the controls of fighter jets, Cummings decided to shift gears and help design those controls herself. Now, as an associate professor at MIT and director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory (HAL), she's a leading practitioner of "human factors" engineering, which focuses on making technical systems safer and more intuitive to use.

Cummings began flying planes after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1988 and received her master's degree in space systems engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994. By the time the policy barring women from operational combat squadrons was ended in 1993, she had established herself as an accomplished pilot. She was selected for the first group of women to fly the F/A-18 Hornet, one of the most technologically advanced fighter jets.

But the new policy hardly eliminated sexism in the armed forces. "It's no secret that the social environment wasn't conducive to my career," says Cummings. "Guys were resentful that a woman was doing a job in what was so clearly a warrior realm and, in my case, involved a blonde girl taking on the role of a killer." (She detailed this experience in her 2000 book Hornet's Nest.) After one particularly troubling episode (she reports that her plane's radio frequencies were accidentally switched and her male colleagues intentionally gave her dangerous taxiing instructions), she took a step back and reëvaluated her career. She left the military in 1999.

With more than a decade of her life invested in the service, however, Cummings knew she wanted to enter a related field. Having been frustrated by unintuitive cockpits, radar screens, and hand controls, she wanted to make these systems easier to use so that pilots could focus on the objectives of the mission. She began taking classes in human cognition and psychology, and in 2003 she finished her PhD in systems engineering at the University of Virginia. That year she arrived at MIT, joining the faculty in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Engineering Systems Division. And in 2004 she founded HAL, which helps people work more effectively with computers to supervise complex automatic control systems like the ones that regulate nuclear reactors or air traffic patterns.