Danette Allen

Dr. Danette Allen is NASA's Senior Technologist (ST) for Intelligent Flight Systems and Deputy Lead of the Agency’s Systems Capability Leadership Team (SCLT) for Autonomous Systems (AS-SCLT). She created and led the Autonomy Incubator at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) and, following that, served as co-PI of the ATTRACTOR (Autonomy Teaming & TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability) project, focused on trust and trustworthiness of autonomous systems. Dr. Allen's career at NASA began with the Lidar In-Space Technology Experiment (LITE), the primary payload on STS-64. For LITE, she wrote real-time flight and ground software and uplinked commands to the Shuttle Discovery from the Payload Operations Control Center (POCC) at Johnson Space Center. Dr. Allen earned her B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, MBA from Manchester University (UK), M.E. in Computer Engineering from Old Dominion University, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill. She is the recipient of multiple NASA awards including the astronauts’ “Silver Snoopy” award for achievements related to human flight safety and mission success, the "Systems Engineering Excellence Award" medal, and the “Outstanding Leadership” medal. Dr. Allen is an AIAA Associate Fellow and a member of the AIAA Intelligent Systems and the Human Machine Teaming Technical Committees.