June 16 Luncheon with Jamie Dunn

Jamie Dunn is director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. As director, he leads more than 6,500 civil servant and contractor employees and oversees a nearly $4 billion annual budget at the agency’s designated Earth and Space Science Center of Excellence.

Prior to becoming center director, Dunn served as associate director and project manager for the $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from 2018 to 2026. In this capacity, he led a multi-disciplinary team of more than 1,000 technicians and engineers to deliver on all aspects of the project: from end-to-end formulation, acquisition strategy, design, development, test, and certification, to final delivery and procurement of operational and mission support services.

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Dunn began his NASA career as a cooperative education student in 1991 working in Goddard’s Space Simulation Test Engineering Section. He rose to the rank of supervisor in 1998. During these early years, he conducted more than 200 tests on spaceflight hardware for major NASA science programs, including the Hubble Space Telescope, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE), and Earth Observing-1 (EO-1).

Following his test engineering work, Dunn held several positions with Hubble, including as integration and testing manager for the Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed aboard Hubble as part of SM4, the final astronaut servicing mission to the telescope, in 2009.

From 2004 through 2016, he was integration and testing manager, deputy project manager, and eventually manager for the James Webb Space Telescope’s Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM). As ISIM manager, Dunn and his team developed the module along with Webb’s science instruments, a $1.5 billion collaboration with ESA and CSA (the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency). He also led the development and delivery of more than a dozen major in-house subsystems for Webb.

From 2017 to 2018, Dunn held deputy project manager and project manager roles with the $6 billion Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites – R Series (GOES-R), a partnership between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He directed the project team in the acquisition of the spacecraft, instruments, and launch services for the GOES-S, -T, and -U missions. After launch and commissioning of GOES-17, he assumed his role as the Roman Space Telescope project manager.

Dunn holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a master’s degree in systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is the 15th director of Goddard, serving in the role since June 2026.