Our Executive Mentors

Alinda Mashiku

Dr. Alinda Mashiku is the Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) Deputy Program Manager and Technical Lead at NASA since 2019. The CARA program is an agency function that is responsible for providing risk analysis for all non-crewed missions for collision avoidance and ensuring the safety of the space environment. In this role, she is responsible for providing technical leadership for ground operations elements, interfacing with multiple mission operations centers and providing oversight in various advanced technologies and engineering application areas. Prior to her current role, she worked as a CARA Systems and Research Engineer performing analysis and research for operational support in various areas such as data analytics for machine learning and artificial intelligence for conjunction assessment and risk analysis.

Dr. Mashiku joined NASA in 2013 supporting various missions as a spacecraft navigation and mission trajectory design engineer. From the time she joined NASA, she worked on the OSIRIS-Rex mission performing several tasks such as reconnaissance-site targeting, trajectory dispersion analysis, solar radiation pressure and thermal effects for orbit stability and satellite interplanetary orbit determination. She also spent some time working on the James Webb Space Telescope analyzing the libration orbit control-box dispersions from the launch window analysis outputs.

She is a recipient of several NASA Awards including the 2020 Engineering and Technology Directorate Excellence in Safety & Quality Assurance Award and a 2020 NASA Mission Engineering and Systems Analysis Division Individual Special Act Award. In 2019, she received the NASA Agency Honor Group Achievement Medal as a committee member of the Women Engineers in Science and Technology. In 2018, she received the NASA 2018 Agency Honors Award for OSIRIS-Rex Earth Gravity Assist Group Achievement and the Robert H. Goddard Award Exceptional Achievement Award for Outreach. She is member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics technical committee in Astrodynamics, and a member of the IAA Permanent Committee on Space Traffic Management.

Dr. Mashiku obtained her bachelor’s degree Cum Laude in Aerospace Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2007, and then both her master’s and PhD in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue University in 2009 and 2013 consecutively. She was a NASA GSRP Fellow from 2010-2013, a recipient of the Purdue Doctoral Fellowship Award from 2007-2010 and other several academic awards. Her professional background and research interests are in hybrid systems estimation, nonlinear Bayesian estimation theory, orbital mechanics, space situational awareness, fault detection and identification, and data compression using information measures using Bayesian Machine Learning for Neural Networks and has authored and co-authored over a dozen conference and journal papers.