Danielle is a big-picture kind of gal. Asked to choose a career other than engineer, she says she’d opt for astronomer. The vastness of the universe and the difficulty of making the almost unimaginable comprehensible are the sort of things that inspire her.

Astronomy also presents a wealth of technical challenges, much like Danielle's job at TI, where she studies the bigger picture of circuit design and searches for creative approaches and fundamentally different ideas to achieve lower cost, lower power or enhanced performance.

For example, Danielle recently invented an approach to overcoming technical issues associated with crystal oscillators in wireless devices. Her team's innovative work led to an oscillator architecture with improved frequency stability that simultaneously lowered noise in half the silicon area without requiring any external components, producing a 50 percent power savings in low-duty-cycle wireless networks.

This innovation will be used in TI's wireless connectivity applications serving both industrial and consumer markets – and it should help enable developments such as the Internet of things to become reality.

Danielle gets her inspiration from her co-workers. She loves interacting with them, bouncing ideas off one another and brainstorming. It’s not all work and no play, though: She also enjoys running, spending time with her husband and kids, and shooting landscape and macro photography.