Service life taught Mcity leader she was more resilient than she knew

Tim Waters, far left, stands with his son, Timothy, and his wife, Vicki, at Timothy’s graduation from Army Ranger School in March 2025. Vicki is Mcity’s assistant director of strategic engagement.

You’d be right to call Vicki Waters a master of understatement when she says, “I’ve had an interesting career path, that’s for sure.”

That path began with working for the New York City Campaign Finance Board before she married Tim Waters, a West Point graduate, and moved to Germany as his military career progressed. After his transfer back to New York, at Fort Drum, Waters ran a state grant that funded programs to prevent teen pregnancy and to serve teens who were already pregnant or parenting.

But she became a de facto single mother with a sick baby and a one-year-old when her husband deployed to the Middle East as an infantry company commander. As the commander’s wife, Waters had the added job of handling family support for the unit, which meant she was the go-to troubleshooting source for the wives of her husband’s men. (Women were excluded from the infantry until 2016.)

Family stability seemed assured when her husband left the Army, joined the FBI and was assigned to Michigan in October 2000—except that he was promptly dispatched overseas to investigate terrorism, including a year in Pakistan and stints in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Waters lived in daily fear of coming home to an FBI agent waiting to deliver bad news. The ever-present tension helped her learn how to manage anxiety and fostered a level of resilience that has since helped her feel that no job is too complicated or too stressful for her to handle. “No one,” Waters said, “is going to die or get killed.”

“The great thing (about that time) is that we were able to stay in Michigan and build a really strong community that was always very supportive whenever he went anywhere,” Waters said. When her husband’s travel ebbed with a promotion, Waters snagged a part-time job at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work before joining a new initiative that became Mcity.

“I thought, ‘This sounds really awesome,’ because it combined government relations with a focus on improving society through better transportation and mobility options,” Waters said of Mcity. “I was lucky enough to become employee No. 2.”

Waters joined Mcity as an administrative assistant and project coordinator. Today, she juggles a host of responsibilities as assistant director of strategic engagement. The job involves managing relationships with current Mcity members, organizing and running semi-annual member meetings, issuing executive updates on Mcity activities, recruiting prospective Mcity members and managing programs under a talent retention grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation aimed at undergraduate and graduate engineering students.

“This morning, for example, I talked to an organization in Saudi Arabia interested in joining Mcity,” Waters said. “It is so interesting to learn what others are doing around the world to prepare for all of the changes happening around mobility.”

Waters recently completed Mcity’s successful pitch to host the June 2026 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, which will bring to Ann Arbor researchers, engineers, practitioners and students representing industry, universities and government agencies that are studying intelligent vehicles and vehicle infrastructure.

“I organize events all the time,” Waters said. “We host an Mcity Congress every year that involves 150 to 200 people, for example. That’s no problem. This is a beast because there are 12 tracks at one time with 800 people attending. We’re responsible for the budget and for the program.”

While Waters doesn’t find organizing a major international tech conference a daunting part of her job, she has faced a learning curve understanding autonomous vehicle technology, something for which her Fordham University political science/psychology degree didn’t prepare her.

“The struggle I have is not being a technical person, because this job has become extremely technical over time,” Waters said. “Now you have artificial intelligence and that’s added a whole level of complexity that really has enhanced what can be done to improve the technology of automated vehicles. So, yeah, it’s been really, really interesting.

“I’m just hopeful that the mind-bending exercises I do to try to understand what is going on will keep me from getting Alzheimer’s down the road,” she joked.

Waters stresses that there’s a big difference between developing autonomous vehicle technology and designing other types of tech.

“The Silicon Valley companies go hard and go fast and break things, right?” Waters said. “That’s great when you’re talking about cell phones or whatever, but that’s not so great when you’re talking about products that got out in the world and have the potential to hurt and kill people. We can be thoughtful and approach this technology in a way that is safe, and Mcity can be the place that develops a methodology to validate its safety.”

During her time off, Waters enjoys hiking with her dog, Rosie, a seven-year-old retriever- collie mix, in Northville’s Maybury State Park. Her daughter, Caylin, 28, graduated from UM’s Ross School of Business in 2019 and is now a vice president at financial powerhouse Goldman Sachs in New York City. Her daughter, Kathryn, 26, graduated from Michigan State University and followed her father’s path to the FBI, where she’s an analyst. The youngest, Timothy, 24, graduated from Virginia Tech as part of the corps of cadets and just completed Army Ranger training as an infantry officer.

“His first duty station will be Hawaii, so we’re excited to be able to go visit him,” Waters said.

Back in high school in New Jersey, Waters planned to go into psychology but, once at college, found political science more appealing. “I thought I’d go to law school until I worked one summer for a top insurance law firm in New Jersey and I knew it wasn’t for me,’” Waters recalled. “Then I wound up getting an internship with New York State Common Cause, and I was like, ‘Wow! This is super cool!’

“I like things to be really fast-paced and I like to be in the thick of things. That’s why I’ve enjoyed being with Mcity. Being in the middle of things is very motivating to me and where I thrive.”

This story was written by Brian J. O’Connor a freelance writer based in Metro Detroit.