NASA Administrator Michael Griffin today named Rex Geveden as the agency’s associate administrator. In this capacity, Geveden has oversight for all the agency’s technical missions’ areas and field center operations. He will be responsible for programmatic integration between NASA’s mission directorates and field centers. He has been serving as acting associate administrator since June.
In November 2004, Geveden became NASA’s chief engineer. As chief engineer, he was the independent technical authority, with responsibility for establishing and maintaining technical requirements and standards across the agency’s programs and projects. Additionally, he was responsible for agency engineering and project management policy, training, and tools.
Geveden was named deputy director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., in July 2003. At Marshall, Geveden shared responsibility for one of the agency’s largest field installations. He previously served as deputy director of Marshall’s Science Directorate, leading research and development projects in space science, materials science, biotechnology, earth science and space optics.
He also led NASA’s Gravity Probe B program, steering development of sophisticated hardware designed to test two features of Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Geveden also was project manager for several other successful efforts, including the Optical Transient Detector and Lightning Imaging Sensor satellites, which produced data for the world’s first global map of lightning.
As manager of the Microgravity Science and Applications Department at Marshall, Geveden led a team of 350 scientists and engineers in the development of flight experiments for the microgravity environment. His organization delivered many of the early payloads to the International Space Station.
Geveden joined NASA in 1990. A native of Mayfield, Ky., he is a graduate of Murray State University and earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering physics in 1983 and his master’s degree in physics in 1984. In 2004, Geveden earned the school’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. Geveden is also a graduate of the Program Management School at the Defense Systems Management College in Fort Belvoir, Va., and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics.
He is married and has two children attending college.
For information about NASA’s engineering programs on the Internet, visit: http://oce.nasa.gov/
