Therese Jorgensen

Therese Jorgensen is currently the Director of the New Opportunities Center at NASA Ames Research Center. Therese’s prior experiences include more than 13 years as Program Director and Section Head for Geospace Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Her accomplishments include conceiving and implementing the National Science Foundation’s CubeSat program, for which she won the NSF Director’s Award for Excellence in Program Management. That program has since been modeled at NASA and other agencies around the world as a standard of an effective management approach to scientific CubeSat programs. It also has firmly established the scientific value of CubeSats by developing highly successful, creative, and innovative missions that carried out important science experiments. In recognition of extraordinary leadership and community service in the field of space science, particularly for her support of CubeSat technology, Therese was honored with AGU’s 2020 Waldo E. Smith award.

Therese has a MSc degree from Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from University of Oxford, U.K. She is a recognized space physics scientist and has worked in various senior research positions in Denmark and in the US, before joining the National Science Foundation in 2004. In 2017 Therese joined the University of Bergen, Norway, as a Senior Scientist and Advisor in the Department of Physics and Technology. During 2019-2020, she was the co-lead and proposal manager for the phase-0 science study for the Daedalus satellite project, a candidate of ESA’s Earth Explorers program.