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Dr. Firouz Naderi
Associate Director
Project Formulation and Strategy
Dr. Naderi is the associate director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory responsible for project formulation and strategy.
Before his current assignment he was the head of Mars Exploration Program, having been named to that position in 2000 after the program had suffered two consecutive failures. He helped replan the program as a chain of scientifically, technologically and operationally interrelated missions with a spacecraft launch to Mars every two years. Naderi led the program for the next five years, a span of time that included the successful launch of Mars Odyssey, landing of the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and the development of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Before Mars, he managed the Origins Program, NASA's ambitious, technology-rich plan to search for Earth-like planets in other planetary systems.
Naderi received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in electrical engineering (writing his dissertation in the area of digital image processing) and joined JPL in 1979. His career at JPL has spanned system engineering, technology development, and program and project management for satellite communications systems, Earth remote sensing observatories, astrophysical observatories and planetary systems.
Naderi is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the recipient of a number of awards, including NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal, Space Technology Hall of Fame Medal and NASA's highest award -- the Distinguished Service Medal.
He is a 2005 recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for outstanding contributions that have enriched American society and exemplify its cultural diversity. Past winners of this award have included President Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Bob Hope and other notables. Naderi is also the 2004 winner of the Liberal Prize awarded by an Italian foundation to an international personality who has "contributed to changes in ideas in modern times." Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received this same award two years earlier.
His early work at JPL was on system design of large satellite-based systems for nationwide cellular phone coverage. He went to NASA Headquarters for two years in the mid-1980s to serve as the program manager for the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite, the front-runner of today's multi-beam, space-switching commercial satellites. Upon his return to JPL, he became the project manager for the NASA Scatterometer project aimed at space-based measurement of winds over the global oceans with application to weather forecasting. He was a co-founder of a startup company in the mid-1980s and consultant to other startup companies in the same period.
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