We are pleased to announce that Dr. Lori Magruder has been appointed as the Director of the Center for Space Research (CSR) effective 1 January 2024.
Dr. Lori Magruder is an Associate Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin and holds the Myron L. Begeman Fellowship in Engineering. Dr. Magruder is a subject matter expert in remote sensing remote sensing instrumentation, implementation, validation, and 3D geospatial data exploitation.
Dr. Magruder received her bachelor’s degree from The University of Southern California in Aerospace Engineering and her master’s degree from Princeton University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. She earned her Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin with a focus on ground-based validation studies for NASA’s ICESat mission.
Prior to returning to UT Austin, she held positions at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. After 10 years of Science Team leadership on the NASA ICESat-2 mission, Dr. Magruder has moved onto positions on other climate-driven remote sensing science teams. Dr. Magruder leads many other NASA research efforts in addition to supporting programs through the Department of Defense with her expertise in geospatial topics and the unique link she brings between engineering and multi-disciplinary science applications.
Previous to becoming the Director of CSR, an organized research unit within the Cockrell School of Engineering, she was the Associate Director of Research and Communications between 2020 – 2022 and served as the interim Director throughout 2023.