NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Christyl Johnson is the Assistant Associate Administrator in the Office of the Administrator. In this role, she assists the Associate Administrator in the oversight of the agency's technical mission areas and field center operations.

Image left: Christyl Johnson, Assistant Associate Administrator, Office of the Administrator. Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.

Johnson came to the Office of the Administrator from the Office of the Chief Engineer, where she served as the Deputy Chief Engineer for Program Integration and Operations. In this role, Johnson provided an integrated focus for the development, maintenance, and implementation of agency engineering and program/project management policies, standards and practices.

Prior to her appointment to the Office of the Chief Engineer, Johnson served as the Associate Director for Exploratory Missions in the Office of Earth Science, where she managed the formulation and development for all Exploratory Missions. The missions that she managed included QuikToms, GRACE, CALIPSO, CLOUDSAT, Triana, AQUARIUS, HYDROS, and OCO, and involved mission development activities at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Langley Research Center and several international and industry partners.

Johnson began her career at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in 1985 in the Remote Sensing Technology Branch where she assisted in designing and building laser systems for advanced active remote sensors. In 1991, she became the program manager and lead engineer of the Diode-Pumped Cr:LiSAF Technology Development Program. In this role she established several initiatives, one of which was an industry and laboratory collaboration to build an efficient Differential Absorption Lidar for remote sensing of H2O vapor. Johnson also established a state-of-the-art laboratory for stress optic coefficient measurement of laser crystals, and utilized this laboratory to provide the science community and laser industry with the first stress optic coefficients for the Cr:LiSAF laser material.

Johnson then served as the subsystem manager for the Diode Seeding Subsystem of the Lidar Atmospheric Sensing Experiment (LASE) flight project, for which she successfully conducted the subsystem planning and scheduling, the coordination of the systems engineering, hardware/software procurement, design and fabrication activities, and integration and environmental testing activities. In 1997, Johnson became assistant head of the Electro-Optics and Controls Branch, where she was responsible for directing a group of 29 employees in the design, development, and application of state-of-the-art and advanced electro-optic systems and subsystems for atmospheric, aeronautic and space flight research missions.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Lincoln University, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Pennsylvania State University. She is married and has one child.

January 2006