Nagin Cox

Systems Engineer

Education

  • Shawnee Mission East, Prairie Village, KS
  • Cornell University – BS in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering and a BA in Psychology
  • Air Force Institute of Technology – Masters, Space Operations Systems Engineering

The year was 1975...

“Jaws” was the biggest movie in theaters, “Love Will Keep Us Together” was the top song on the radio and 10-year-old Nagin Cox’s home life was unraveling. It was a time when Cox thought only about making it to age 18 so she could be free.

“I remember looking up at the stars and thinking, ‘I’m going to live and get through this,” Cox recalls. “I need to set a goal. I need something so meaningful it will help me get through the next eight years.’”

That goal revealed itself when she was 14, a curly-haired Indian girl fascinated by “Star Trek” and Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” She wanted to explore the universe. And no, she didn’t want to be an astronaut.

“If you really want to go where someone has never been, you want to be with the robots. They truly explore first,” she says. “There was one place that did that consistently and that was NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”

She just needed to figure out how.

At a Glance

Nagin graduated from Cornell University with a BS in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering and a BA in Psychology and was commissioned as an officer in the US Air Force. She worked in F-16 Aircrew Training and received a masters degree in Space Operations Systems Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology.

As a captain, she served as an Orbital Analyst at NORAD/Space Command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs.

In 1993, Nagin joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and has since served as a systems engineer and manager on multiple interplanetary robotic missions including NASA/JPL’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Exploration Rover Missions and the Kepler telescope mission to search for Earth-like planets around other stars.

Where are they from?

Planetary science is a global profession.