Nagin Cox has been exploring since she decided as a teenager that she wanted to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She was born in Bangalore, India, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Nagin has held leadership and system engineering positions on interplanetary robotic missions including the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Kepler exoplanet hunter, InSight, the Mars Curiosity Rover and now the 2020 Perseverance Rover. She was also involved in the MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment) team which will prototype making oxygen on Mars from the Martian atmosphere. She is currently a Tactical Mission Lead on both the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover and the Mars Curiosity Rover.
Nagin is honored to be the namesake for Asteroid 14061. She has also received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and two NASA Exceptional Achievement Medals. She is a U.S. Department of State’s STEM Speaker and has spoken to audiences around the US, Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and South Asia on the stories of the people behind the missions. Her lecture on Mars Time on the TED Talk website has been viewed more than two million times.
Before her time at JPL, she served in the US Air Force including duty as a Space Operations Officer at NORAD/US Space Command. Nagin holds engineering degrees from Cornell University and the Air Force Institute of Technology as well as a psychology degree from Cornell.
She is a past member of Cornell University’s President’s Council for Cornell Women and has served on the Boards of the Griffith Observatory Foundation and Impact Personal Safety: Self-Defense & Empowerment for Women. She sits on the Advisory Committee for the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and is part of the Advisory Council for the Planetary Society.
Lori Garver was named a Belfer Center Senior Fellow in January 2022.
Garver is a leading figure in the U.S. space program. She was the principal civil and commercial advisor on aerospace issues to three presidential candidates and led the NASA transition team for President-elect Obama. Nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Garver served as the Deputy Administrator of the space agency from 2009 - 2013. Known as an architect of the new era of commercial partnerships that are allowing SpaceX to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, Garver pioneered innovations that are transforming NASA.
Garver is CEO of Earthrise Alliance, a philanthropic organization, founded to more fully utilize satellite data to address climate change. She serves as an Executive in Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners and is a member of the Board of Directors of Hydrosat. Lori is a former board member of Maxar Technologies, General Manager of the Air Line Pilots Association, Vice President of the Avascent Group, and Executive Director of the National Space Society.
She is the founder of the Brooke Owens Fellowship, an internship and mentorship program for collegiate women interested in pursuing aerospace careers. Garver is the recipient of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award for Women in Aerospace and has been awarded three NASA Distinguished Service Medals. She holds a B.A. in Political Economy from Colorado College and an M.A. in Science, Technology and Public Policy from the George Washington University.
Garver writes and speaks extensively on space issues and has authored opinion-editorials that have recently been published in the Washington Post and Scientific American. Her memoir, Escaping Gravity, will be released in June 2022.
Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, a graduate of the Mid-Career MPA candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, determines civil and commercial space policy priorities for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Her portfolio includes Orbital Debris, On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM), Earth Observations, Space Weather, Aeronautics, and Planetary Protection.
In 17 years at NASA, she contributed to over 60 missions and programs – as an engineer, technical expert, manager and executive – in earth observations, planetary science, heliophysics, astrophysics, human exploration, and space communications, which represent $9.2 Billion in total program value. Her last role was as a heliophysics program executive.
At NASA Headquarters, she led a heliophysics portfolio of spaceflight missions, including the PUNCH, TRACERS, and MAGIC within the Science Mission Directorate.
At NASA Ames, she directed the Small Spacecraft Mission Design Division, including the Mission Design Center, led teams in developing advanced spacecraft mission concepts, and developed partnerships with government agencies. In several Chief Engineer roles, she provided oversight for over 20 programs on systems engineering and software systems as technical authority. She led a mission design concept for a constellation of eight small satellites.
At NASA Goddard, within the flight segment, she contributed significantly in areas of engineering leadership and technical development of flight hardware and software on several spacecraft missions, including TESS (launched 2018), NICER (launched 2017), GPM (launched 2014), Constellation Program - Orion/EFT-1 (launched 2014), ELC (launched 2009), and Cassini (inserted into Saturn's Orbit in 2004). Within the ground segment, she co-led the $300M Spacecraft Communication and Navigation Integration Project with JPL and NASA Glenn partners. She served as the technical authority on over 20 mission operational readiness reviews. Within R&D, she led the development of remote-sensing image registration algorithms, which resulted in NASA-owned registration algorithm patents.
She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and masters degrees in Space Systems, and Space Robotics from Johns Hopkins University, and MIT.
