Patrick Livanos Lester is the author of Flat Broke in Paradise, the first novel in the Nick Thomas Adventures Series. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Patrick received a research fellowship to do his masters degree at NASA Ames Research Center. There he found a mentor and joined a team designing collision avoidance systems and cockpit traffic displays for commercial aircraft. When he completed his degree Lockheed’s space station program recruited him to design their neutral buoyancy program. That translates to putting crew members in specialized space suits in a big tank of water to simulate the weightless environment.
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| Patrick Livanos Lester Messing about on a Boat |
Later he designed flight crew training for a space shuttle flight, then moved back to NASA to manage space station flight and ground operations for non-human life sciences with a stint at NASA HQ in Washington, D.C. During that time he traveled to Hawaii to attend the Governor’s Conference on Space, where he met famed anthropologist Ben Finney who encouraged him to further his education at the University of Hawaii, and offered to sit on his doctoral committee.
Back on the mainland, he was being recruited to work at NASA headquarters when he realized he really didn’t like the politics, waste, or culture of the nation’s capital. Being a lifelong sailor, the call of the tropics was a loud one. By then, he had applied to a Ph.D. program at the University of Hawaii. On St. Patrick’s day, he was accepted to the program and told “We need an answer now.” So he gave notice, packed up, and put 23 boxes and a Jeep on a boat for Hawaii.
He finished everything for his degree, but his advisor was not given tenure and returned to his native country. He moved to another department at the university, and his new advisor retired shortly thereafter due to health reasons. That left Patrick sans Ph.D. in the tropics where he was determined to make the best of it. He traveled to Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific as a business consultant. He would meet his future wife during that time and on one trip they sat at the judges' table at the Miss Tahiti Contest. It would take them another fifteen years to reconnect and marry. In Hawaii he started a company and raced yachts offshore. In fact, he did a lot of messing about on boats.
In Hawaii he picked up a paintbrush and followed in the artistic steps of his father and grandmother. He moved back to California and found another mentor in Bill Sala, an astounding surrealist painter, who told him, “You’re ready for oils.”
He timed his return to the Silicon Valley well. He worked as a business development consultant to more than forty companies in the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia during the dot-com era. Patrick was an Executive Advisor to The Enterprise Network, a NASA-funded business incubator in the Silicon Valley. He has also served on the boards of the Hawaii Venture Capital Association, the Electric Vehicle Association of Hawaii, the Hayward Arts Council, and the Discovery Space Technology Center at Stanford. He was an Associate Partner at SG Capital Partners, a Geneva-based merchant bank.
Patrick has been writing most of his life and has published short stories and twenty-three poems in Infinity Limited, a family-run literary magazine. He has published numerous professional articles, a few in refereed journals.
Patrick is a licensed California real estate broker, painter, sculptor, and holds a Graduate Gemologist designation from the Gemological Institute of America.
Patrick lives with his wife Kim in California and Hawaii and other places with sailboats and palm trees.
Back on the mainland, he was being recruited to work at NASA headquarters when he realized he really didn’t like the politics, waste, or culture of the nation’s capital. Being a lifelong sailor, the call of the tropics was a loud one. By then, he had applied to a Ph.D. program at the University of Hawaii. On St. Patrick’s day, he was accepted to the program and told “We need an answer now.” So he gave notice, packed up, and put 23 boxes and a Jeep on a boat for Hawaii.
He finished everything for his degree, but his advisor was not given tenure and returned to his native country. He moved to another department at the university, and his new advisor retired shortly thereafter due to health reasons. That left Patrick sans Ph.D. in the tropics where he was determined to make the best of it. He traveled to Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific as a business consultant. He would meet his future wife during that time and on one trip they sat at the judges' table at the Miss Tahiti Contest. It would take them another fifteen years to reconnect and marry. In Hawaii he started a company and raced yachts offshore. In fact, he did a lot of messing about on boats.
In Hawaii he picked up a paintbrush and followed in the artistic steps of his father and grandmother. He moved back to California and found another mentor in Bill Sala, an astounding surrealist painter, who told him, “You’re ready for oils.”
He timed his return to the Silicon Valley well. He worked as a business development consultant to more than forty companies in the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia during the dot-com era. Patrick was an Executive Advisor to The Enterprise Network, a NASA-funded business incubator in the Silicon Valley. He has also served on the boards of the Hawaii Venture Capital Association, the Electric Vehicle Association of Hawaii, the Hayward Arts Council, and the Discovery Space Technology Center at Stanford. He was an Associate Partner at SG Capital Partners, a Geneva-based merchant bank.
Patrick has been writing most of his life and has published short stories and twenty-three poems in Infinity Limited, a family-run literary magazine. He has published numerous professional articles, a few in refereed journals.
Patrick is a licensed California real estate broker, painter, sculptor, and holds a Graduate Gemologist designation from the Gemological Institute of America.
Patrick lives with his wife Kim in California and Hawaii and other places with sailboats and palm trees.
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