Omar Ishak: Bioengineer by day, sports car tinkerer by night
Omar Ishak was 13 when he got his first car — or rather, the pieces of his first car. He had helped in his dad’s auto shop in the summers from age 10 to 12, but the vehicle that his dad presented, an Acura Integra, was a challenging first car. Missing most of one side and without a working engine, it seemed to Omar as if it were better off as scrap metal. "If you can piece together all the parts," Omar remembers his dad saying, "you can have it." Omar, now a technical project manager in Weapons Production (ALDWP) with the Transition to Operations/Readiness (PPI-3) group, at first felt overwhelmed at the enormity of what needed to be finished. As a child, he’d played with Legos and liked to tinker and take broken things apart. Then he’d become fascinated with building smaller-scaled model cars and, by the time his dad owned that shop, the fascination had manifested into real cars.