Claudia Mowery is Vice President of USAF programs, responsible for managing all domestic MQ-9A US Air Force, Air Force Special Operations Command, and Air National Guard programs. Claudia joined GA-ASI in January 2007 and has been in the unmanned aircraft industry since 2001.
While at GA-ASI, Claudia has held several positions including: Program Director of USAF Block 50 Ground Control Station responsible for managing development and test.
Technical Director / Chief Engineer of the Block 50 GCS. Claudia was responsible for successful technical design reviews: Preliminary Design Review (Apr 2016) and Critical Design Review (May 2017) as well as Contractor Testing and First flight of the Block 50 GCS (2019).
Integration Manager for the Army’s flagship MQ-1C Gray Eagle program ($100M Acquisition Category ACAT-1D). Claudia was directly responsible for the integration and testing of the system in preparation for an Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) and a Follow-on Test and Evaluation (FOT&E). Both of these milestone test events were successfully executed in 2012 and 2015 respectively and resulted in Full Rate Production (FRP) for the program.
Prior to 2007, Claudia worked at Northrop Grumman where she held various positions as an Engineer: Mass Properties Engineer, Mechanical Subsystems Engineer (fuel, bleed-air, hydraulic), Environmental Control Systems Engineer, and Guidance Navigation and Controls Engineer on the RQ-4A and RQ-4B Global Hawk program for 5 years.
Ms. Mowery earned her Mechanical Engineering degree from San Diego State University with the distinguished honor of “Summa Cum Laude” and Valedictorian of the College of Engineering (2001). She also holds a Systems Engineering Certificate from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (2004) and is a graduate from the University of California San Diego’s Executive Perspective for Scientists and Engineers Program (2016).
Claudia was recently honored by AIAA for Outstanding Contribution to Aerospace Engineering (2019) and San Diego Magazine’s Rising Star (2018).
AIAA Associate Fellow and member of the Talent and Leadership Development Committee; Region IV Director
Kate is a Senior Systems Engineer in the Space Payload and Ground Systems Division at Northrop Grumman. She has a BS in Systems Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, an MS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland, and previously worked for nine years at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on space and high-altitude balloon missions for NASA. She is a lifetime member of AIAA and has been active in various roles across the institute including former chair of the Space Automation and Robotics Technical Committee (SARTC), local section leadership, SPACE forum organizing committee, SMG and New Initiatives Subcommittee, SciTech keynote speaker, and most recently on the Talent and Leadership Development Committee. In her spare time Kate enjoys boating and crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay and coaches Track and Field at her local high school.
AIAA Fellow and member of the Talent and Leadership Development Committee
Dr. Jeff Puschell is an internationally recognized Ph.D. scientist engineer with more than 30 years of comprehensive knowledge and experience in successfully developing state-of-the-art earth remote sensing satellite systems. He has been Principal Investigator, Program Manager, Chief Engineer, Chief Scientist, Technical Director or Co-Investigator on 15+ major projects sponsored by governments and private industry in space-based remote sensing, laser-based systems and observational astrophysics, including leadership roles in space-based imaging and remote sensing systems such as MTSAT-1R, VIIRS and CrIS. He is a Principal Fellow of the Raytheon Company, an honor awarded to less than 0.1% of the technical personnel in the Company and Chief Scientist for Space Systems. In their Principal Fellowship award statement, Raytheon’s executive management described Puschell as “… one of the world’s leading space-based remote sensing systems engineers…well known and highly regarded throughout the international remote sensing community as an innovative and insightful remote sensing system architect with exceptionally broad technical skill and knowledge…trusted by Customers … active in working directly with them to translate their remote sensing needs into system architectures and designs.” He is currently Principal Investigator for the NASA-funded Advanced Technology Land Imaging Spectroradiometer (ATLIS) Prototype development, a next generation land imager suitable for small satellites.
AIAA Senior Member, member of the Talent and Leadership Development Committee and Hypersonic Technology & Aerospace Planes TC, and AIAA DEFENSE Forum Technical Committee Chair
Phoebe Wall is a 2019 National Gold Award Girl Scout and aero/astro student at Stanford University. For their Gold Award project, Phoebe founded and led a digital literary magazine for queer youth. They are passionate about improving queer representation in media and the mental health of young queer people. Their magazine gained traction in over 40 countries, including nations where homosexual activity is illegal.
As Spaceshot Co-Lead in the Stanford Student Space Initiative (SSI), one of the largest project organizations on Stanford’s campus, Phoebe is leading a project to launch a rocket off of a high-altitude weather balloon to pass the Kármán line. When the project succeeds it will be both the most economical method by orders of magnitude and the first open-source platform to get to space. Phoebe’s involvement in SSI also includes co-leading a project team building a machine to autonomously create bricks from Martian regolith, and they’re in the finalist round for a proposal to make these bricks on the International Space Station. They also are co-leading a project team building a muon detector and co-leading the simulations for the liquid bipropellant rocket team. Phoebe and three other students on SSI’s Policy Team had plans to present on sustainability and human heritage in space to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in March before the pandemic rescheduled the meeting to a still undetermined date. Phoebe is passionate about the intersections of aerospace engineering and environmental sustainability.
Previously, Phoebe partnered with NASA and Dr. Mark Weislogel of Portland State University to conduct microgravity fluid physics research. Phoebe’s work included developing a mathematical model of bubble production in flows driven by capillary action, a model they used to propose modifications to spacecraft heat transfer systems. They’ve presented their research at the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research conference three years in a row, winning 3rd place and 4th place in the poster competitions and also the Student Investigator Spaceflight Award from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS). Phoebe has also assisted with hybrid propulsion research in the Stanford Propulsion and Space Exploration (SPaSE) Lab.
Phoebe’s professional experience includes interning on Firefly’s Alpha vehicle design and analysis team, modeling GSE systems for the small startup Green Launch, a NASA internship, and beginning as a Pathways Intern at NASA Marshall this January.
Therese Malinowski is a freshman in First Year Engineering at Purdue University with the intent to major in Aerospace Engineering. She has been a Girl Scout since kindergarten and earned the honor of 2020 National Gold Award Girl Scout for her database “Project Dandelion,” the world’s first comprehensive campus sexual assault resource.
After learning that many colleges have purposefully covered up student sexual assault allegations from a documentary, and then finding that information regarding sexual assault on college campuses was incredibly difficult to find, Therese became motivated to create a resource for potential and current college students to understand the reality of sexual assault at a specific school. The database became known as “Project Dandelion,” and currently covers specific statistics, resources, and information on every college in Illinois, as well as general information that applies to every college in the nation. The database is still a work in progress, and developments are underway to grow this project to a national resource. Everyone needs to go to a college they feel safe attending, and information transparency is the first step to improving the dangerous culture of campus sexual assault.
Therese has always had a deep love for engineering and aviation. She currently participates in Purdue’s Engineering Projects in Community Service Program, serving as design lead for a mobility technology team, and is an active member of AIAA, and serves on the Vertical Flight Systems design team. Outside of school, she volunteers at a local airport through her EAA chapter to shadow A&Ps and help with the construction of an experimental aircraft.
Megan Loh is a 2019 National Gold Award Girl Scout and a freshman at Stanford University interested in pursuing physics. She joined Girl Scouts when she was in Kindergarten. For her Gold Award project, she started a nonprofit organization, GEARup4Youth, to bridge the gender gap in technology, especially for underserved populations. With the help of over 200 volunteers and 200 partners, she has reached 13,500 girls and 24,000 youth worldwide.
Megan has been passionate about STEM, especially technology, ever since she was little. However, throughout her experiences working in the STEM field, she has seen the severity of gender stereotyping first-hand. When she realized that women, especially minorities, are critically underrepresented in technology, she set off to make a change. She launched her first girls-only programming class at a local library in 2015, and her programs began to gain popularity. Today, besides offering robotics/programming classes to underprivileged girls at eight Boys and Girls Clubs, she has hosted presentations in partnership with science museums, public libraries, and radio-stations; promoted familial support for girls in STEM during elementary school family events, and brought the fun of programming to Malaysia, making a global impact. She published her own book to reach a broader audience and stimulate more girls’ interests in STEM, which is available at online stores worldwide.
Since her Gold Award, Megan’s activism in the diversity, equity and inclusion sector has continued to grow. She has been a contributing author to two more books, one about socio-economic sustainable development with a focus on equity in education, and the other aimed to inspire young changemakers to incite change in their own communities. Academically, she has researched for three years with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and has started a new project investigating dark matter detection with the LHC.
