Our Executive Mentors

Raha Hakimdavar

Raha Hakimdavar is the Director of Space Sciences at Ball Aerospace, where she leads civil science strategy development and relationship building with the government and science community. She works with Ball’s Strategic Operations team in Arlington, Virginia.

Previously, Dr. Hakimdavar was a hydrologist and acting national program lead in remote sensing and geospatial research at the U.S. Department Agriculture Forest Service where, among other efforts, she developed novel data-driven approaches to assess forest and aquatic resilience under threat from climate change and increased the agency’s capacity to utilize satellite data for decision making. She led research on the integration of space-based data into the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, developed a concept for a whole of government global hydrology model to assess water security threats, and coordinated Earth science research and applications across NASA during her Presidential Management Fellowship appointment at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr. Hakimdavar served as a consultant for United Nations Environment and the World Bank in the Caribbean, where she notably helped establish the first fully integrated hydro-meteorological network to support disaster risk reduction, agroforestry, and hydropower development in the South Department of Haiti.

Dr. Hakimdavar earned a B.S. in civil engineering from California State Polytechnic University and a M.S. and Ph.D. in hydrology and water management from Columbia University. She was a Fulbright research scholar at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow and was awarded the KLM Airlines Sustainability and Innovation Award for her work and research on hydro-ecology. Dr. Hakimdavar is also an adjunct professor in water and climate science at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service where she hopes to inspire and prepare the next generation of climate and environment leaders.