Wes Deadrick, Director of NASA’s IV&V Program

Wes Deadrick is the Director of NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Program, located at the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in Fairmont, West Virginia. He is responsible for the leadership and technical direction of the IV&V Program and agency-wide strategy to provide the highest achievable levels of safety, reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness for NASA’s most critical mission software.

Mr. Deadrick began his NASA career in 2002 at the NASA IV&V Program as a research engineer within the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) Software Assurance Research Program (SARP).  After spending five years managing and performing software research and software tool development, Mr. Deadrick accepted a position as an IV&V Project Manager.  Over the period of six years, Mr. Deadrick was responsible for leading the implementation of IV&V services on a number of NASA missions and programs including Juno, Kepler, MSL, JWST, JPSS, MAVEN, OSIRIS-REx, and Constellation.  During 2010, Mr. Deadrick served on detail at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as the software lead for a component of NASA’s Constellation Program.  Subsequent to his role as an IV&V Project Manager, Mr. Deadrick served as the Lead for the IV&V Program Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) Support Office (SSO) where he was responsible for providing software engineering and assurance reach-back support to OSMA and the NASA Commercial Crew Program.  As the SSO Lead, Mr. Deadrick was also responsible for overseeing the initiation of the IV&V Program’s cybersecurity assurance capability – now referred to as Mission Protection Services (MPS).  Directly prior to becoming the Director of the NASA IV&V Program, Mr. Deadrick led the Program’s IV&V Office, which is responsible for providing IV&V services to a broad portfolio of NASA’s most critical, and highest profile, science and human spaceflight missions.  As the IV&V Office lead, Mr. Deadrick employed a merit-based approach to advancing the IV&V Office engineering workforce to ensure it was best positioned to provide highly effective services to the mission customers, the Agency, and the country. As Director, Mr. Deadrick serves as a senior staff member for the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA Headquarters.

Mr. Deadrick has earned several prestigious awards throughout his NASA career, including the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, a Space Flight Awareness award, numerous Project Achievement awards, and the inaugural Terrence W. Wilcutt Award for excellence in advancing safety and mission assurance.

Mr. Deadrick is a West Virginia native from Petersburg and now resides in Morgantown, WV with his wife, Ann, and their four children.