Rae Ann Meyer

Rae Ann Meyer is associate director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Named to the position in January 2022, she leads development of the center’s business operations, guides daily business decisions, and oversees center operational policy and processes. In addition, she is a senior adviser in advancing the direction of the center’s future.

Meyer helps manage the center’s 7,000 on- and near-site civil service and contract employees and helps oversee an annual budget of approximately $4.5 billion. Shel provides executive leadership across Marshall’s mission support areas as well as the center’s diverse portfolio of human spaceflight, science, and technology efforts, which touch nearly every mission NASA pursues.

Meyer was previously deputy manager of Marshall’s Science and Technology Office. Named to the Senior Executive Service position in May 2019, she assisted in leading the organization responsible for planning, developing, and executing a broad range of science and technology investigations, programs, projects, and activities in support of NASA’s science, technology, and exploration goals. The office also leads the pursuit of new partnership opportunities with other government agencies and private industry. Meyer helped oversee an annual budget of more than $475 million and managed a diverse, highly technical workforce of approximately 300 civil service and contractor employees.

The Senior Executive Service is the personnel system covering top managerial positions in federal agencies. 

Meyer was tasked in 2017 with establishing the charter for and managing Marshall’s Science and Technology Partnerships and Formulation Office, which oversees Marshall’s Space Act Agreement process and enacts NASA strategies for new partnerships and joint opportunities. In 2016, while performing other duties at Marshall, she served as a technical advisor for NASA’s Office of Strategy and Plans at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

She was the chief of the Marshall Engineering Directorate’s Structural Design and Analysis Division from 2010-2017 and deputy manager of its Flight Mechanics and Analysis Division from 2007-2010, supporting a range of vehicle and spacecraft hardware development, including NASA’s Space Launch System, its next flagship rocket to the Moon and Mars, and design studies supporting future NASA missions. 

From 2006-2007, she was manager of the Constellation Support Office in Marshall’s Science and Mission Systems Office, coordinating technical and programmatic support for the Constellation Program development effort that would inform the Space Launch System and the human-rated Orion crew module it will lift to Earth orbit and beyond.

Meyer was manager of the Science and Technology Office’s In-Space Propulsion Technology Office from 2005-2006, and its deputy manager from 2004-2005. She was named technical assistant to the Space Transportation Directorate’s in-space investment area, which became the In-Space Technology Projects Office, from 2002-2004. She was assistant manager of Marshall’s Space Transfer Technology Project from 2000-2002. 

Meyer’s NASA career began in 1989 as a control mechanisms engineer in Marshall’s Propulsion Laboratory.

Among her achievements and awards, Meyer received a NASA Silver Achievement Medal in 2019, the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal in 2012 for leading development of strategies for pursuing new program/project opportunities; a NASA Certificate of Appreciation in 2001 for leading formulation efforts to augment in-space propulsion technology budgets across NASA; and Marshall Director’s Commendations in 2004 and 2009, honoring her work on advanced technology development efforts supporting future science missions and major product development for the Ares Project Preliminary Design Review, respectively.

A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Meyer earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1989. 

Meyer, her husband, David, also a Marshall employee, and their children reside in Madison, Alabama.