Dr. Joanne (Joe) Hill-Kittle was appointed as the Deputy Director for NASA Goddard’s Engineering and Technology Directorate (ETD) in May of 2021 following a 3-month detail. Joe’s responsibilities include developing and executing the ETD strategy to enable missions and instruments that will answer the far-reaching science questions of the future. In FY21/FY22 Joe overhauled the funding process for ETD’s technical capabilities to provide a sustainable operations and maintenance budget. Joe is excited to be leading the implementation of a Digital Engineering strategy to increase efficiency and agility of the organization and to partner more effectively with the commercial landscape. She is also the Senior Champion for the Asian American and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Employee Resource Group and is committed to increasing diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in ETD and across NASA.
From Nov 2018-May 2021, Joe served as the Acting Deputy Director for Institutions, Programs, and Business Management and the Deputy Director for the Sciences and Exploration Directorate (SED). Her responsibilities included business development and budget management, and she served on the Center Institutional Operations Council. She has more than 20 years of scientific and engineering experience including complete mission life cycle, combined with state-of-the-art technology development, from proof of concept to flight design, fabrication and assembly, and environmental testing, calibration, and on-orbit operations.
Joe’s research background is in space instrumentation including X-ray polarimeters, X-ray detector systems, and X-ray optics. She was the Instrument Scientist for the X-ray Telescope on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory that successfully launched in 2004 and is still detecting gamma-ray bursts today. Following this passion for building instrumentation to answer scientific questions, she joined the X-ray Astrophysics laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in July 2005. Joe worked closely with scientists and engineers leading the development of a new technology for measuring X-ray polarization, which can provide insight into the extreme environment around black holes.
Prior to joining the NASA, Joe served as a Senior Research Scientist at Universities Space Research Association, and a Research Associate at Penn State University. She received her Degree and Doctorate, from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.
