David R. Francisco

Mr. Dave Francisco is the Technical Fellow for Health, Medical & Performance Spaceflight Standards within the NASA Headquarters Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer (OCHMO). His responsibilities include the generation, review/validation and adjudication of all NASA-wide space flight health, medical and human performance standards. He collaborates with subject matter experts across the agency, country, and international partners to ensure the best possible evidence is utilized for development/updates of space flight health and performance standards that protect the crew while enabling NASA’s missions.

Prior to holding this position, he was at JSC leading the development and implementation of the NASA Human System Risk Board and was the Divison Chief leading the Biomedical Research and Medical Testing Divison responsible for implementing human research content and astronaut testing for the agency. Prior to those positions he was at GRC where he managed teams and designed, tested, and flown spacecraft hardware, including electric propulsion thrusters, research racks for ISS, spaceflight instrumentation and human countermeasure systems.  Dave has also been a member of several source evaluation boards and standing review boards for multibillion dollar programs across the Agency.  

Dave holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering.  He is the recipient of 5 NASA Agency Honor Medals for Outstanding Leadership (2), Engineering Excellence (1) and Exceptional Achievement (2), and the Astronaut Silver Snoopy Award, a Flight Awareness Award, and several agency level group awards for contributions to enable human spaceflight.  He has also been a recipient of two group R&D 100 awards and electronic product of the year award for revolutionary science and technology development.