May 17, 2024

I am pleased to share some exciting news regarding senior executive detail backfills to provide broadening opportunities for some of our leadership team.

Agency leadership has chosen Dr. Lori Glaze to begin a six-month detail as the Acting Deputy AA for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) due to the transition of Kelvin Manning back to KSC at the end of May 2024. It is expected that this detail will begin imminently, to allow for some transition time before the end of May. Lori’s detail will be for a 6-month period, while ESDMD broadly advertises the Deputy AA position.

This is an incredible opportunity to have an exceptional leader and advocate for planetary science, and all science, within ESDMD. Lori’s outstanding leadership of the Planetary Science Division make her uniquely qualified and the ideal candidate to help continue to strengthen the ties between science and exploration. As we know, exploration enables science, and science enables exploration.  

Lori has done an incredible job of leading the NASA Planetary Science community for the past six years. To name only a selection of highlights, Lori has overseen: Insight landing on Mars and completion of its mission, Perseverance beginning the task of Mars Sample Return, Ingenuity’s paradigm-changing 72 flights, DART’s successful impact, the launch of Lucy and Psyche, OSIRIS-REx’s incredible return of 121 g of material from Bennu, the start of a real renaissance in Venus exploration, and Europa Clipper preparing for its launch this fall.

To temporarily backfill Lori’s position, I have asked Dr. Gina DiBraccio to join the SMD leadership team on a short-term detail beginning May 27. Gina currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Gina also serves as the Deputy Principal Investigator and Project Scientist of NASA’s MAVEN mission. Gina has also been involved in research at Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus by utilizing data from the MESSENGER, MAVEN, Juno, Cassini, and Voyager 2 missions.

We are very excited about these temporary changes in ESDMD, SMD and GSFC leadership, and the broadening opportunities it provides for our Agency leaders. These changes strengthen all three organizations by taking advantage of the great leaders we have in place to ensure all our organizations have strong management. We look forward to continued success in leading the entire Agency team in achieving our mission and science objectives.

While it is hard to let Lori go from SMD, I am so pleased and excited that we will have an incredible leader in science help steward the Artemis campaign. Please join me in wishing Lori great success in her temporary new role and welcoming Gina into SMD and her new role!