Lori Glaze

Dr. Lori Glaze is the associate administrator for NASA’s Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate. In this role, she leads human spaceflight development and operations supporting the agency’s continuous human presence in low Earth orbit, Artemis missions to the Moon, and establishment of a Moon Base for scientific discovery, technology advancement, and developing capabilities to live and work in deep space as the agency prepares for human missions to Mars. 

Previously, she was the associate administrator for the agency’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, where she managed human exploration systems development for Moon and Mars exploration. During her tenure, she oversaw the successful Artemis II mission, which returned humans to the lunar vicinity for the first time in more than 50 years and safely brought them home, laying the groundwork for future crewed Artemis missions.

Prior to her human spaceflight roles, Glaze served as director of the Planetary Science Division in the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. During her six-year tenure, she led NASA’s portfolio of missions to study the solar system through formulation, development, and operations, including Insight’s landing and mission on Mars, the Mars rover Perseverance beginning its task of Mars Sample Return, Ingenuity’s powered flights on Mars, DART’s successful impact of an asteroid, the launches of Lucy and Psyche, OSIRIS-REx’s return of samples from the asteroid Bennu, and preparations for the Europa Clipper launch. 

Prior to her time at NASA Headquarters, she was the chief of the Planetary Geology, Geophysics and Geochemistry Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the deputy director of Goddard’s Solar System Exploration Division. 

As a science researcher, her work focused on physical processes in terrestrial and planetary volcanology, atmospheric transport and diffusion processes, and geologic mass movements. She also contributed to many NASA-sponsored Venus mission concept-formulation studies, including as principal investigator for the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging mission until her move to headquarters. 

Born in Texas, Glaze earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of Texas at Arlington and a doctorate in environmental science from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. She also previously worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and at Proxemy Research as vice president and senior research scientist.