As the Chief Engineer for the Engineering and Technology Directorate (ETD), Mr. Trenkle is responsible for providing senior engineering expertise, leading and/or supporting independent technical reviews, troubleshooting issues, developing standards, and providing expert guidance to support a broad range of GSFC and ETD subsystem, system, and mission commitments.

Prior to becoming the ETD Chief Engineer, Mr. Trenkle served in many GSFC technical leadership positions including: NESC Chief Engineer at GSFC; Program System Engineer for the Explorers and Heliophysics Projects Division; Chief Engineer for the Joint Polar Satellite System Flight Project; Lead Systems Engineer for the MAVEN Project; and Chief Engineer For the NPOESS Preparatory Project.

Mr. Trenkle got his start at Goddard in the in-house Small Explorer Program (SMEX) where he filled a variety of roles including the Lead System Engineer for SWAS and the SMEX-Lite technology development effort. The SMEX-Lite development became the basis of the Triana design where Mr. Trenkle was the lead systems engineer.

Mr. Trenkle has been a member of and/or chaired a number of failure and anomaly review boards most notably the ICESat Laser-1 anomaly, the Aeronomy of ICE in the Meosphere (AIM) Command Outage Anomaly, and the ICESat-II ATLAS Q-Switch Detachment Tiger Team. Mr. Trenkle led the AIM anomaly and ATLAS Q-Switch teams.

Prior to coming to Goddard, Mr. Trenkle worked for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation designing and testing radar signal processors for airborne tactical and ground-based air traffic control radar systems. Mr. Trenkle has a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland and a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University.