Marissa Herron is a Ph.D. student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at RAND. Her research interests include artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomous vehicles, space, and cyber capabilities, as well as science and technology policy and national security.

Prior to joining Pardee RAND, she was a program executive at NASA Headquarters for the Sustainable Land Imaging partnership and Landsat spacecraft. She previously managed operations in the Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and supported human spaceflight operations and flight dynamics analysis for the Space Shuttle and Soyuz missions. She has an M.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, an M.S. in remote sensing intelligence from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Arizona.