August 12, 2025 GRAA Luncheon
American Legion Post #136
6900 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD 20771
The speaker for the August 12, 2025 Goddard Retirees & Alumni Association (GRAA) luncheon was Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, Goddard Center Directory (Recent). Dr. Lystrup was the 14th Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She served in this position from April 2023 until August 1, 2025.
Prior to joining NASA, Dr. Lystrup was vice president and general manager of Ball Aerospace’s Civil Space Strategic Business Unit, where she was responsible for the company’s portfolio of civil space systems spanning across all science fields, operational weather and Earth observation, as well as advanced technologies development objectives. In this role, she led Ball’s contributions to several missions, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), Landsat 9, and the Roman Space Telescope.
Prior to joining Ball, Dr. Lystrup worked as an American Institute of Physics – Acoustical Society of American (AIP-ASA) Congressional Fellow from 2011 to 2012 in the office of U.S. Representative Edward Markey, where she managed a portfolio including technology, national defense, nuclear energy, and nuclear nonproliferation.
Dr. Lystrup has served on boards and committees for several organizations to include the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), the University of Colorado, and the American Astronomical Society (AAS), where she also served as chair of the Committee on Planetary Science Policy. In 2023, she was named an SPIE fellow for her work in optics along with being named an AAS fellow. She was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow in 2019 for her distinguished record in the fields of planetary science and infrared astronomy, science policy and advocacy, and aerospace leadership. Dr. Lystrup also served as an AmeriCorps volunteer focusing on STEM education.
Dr. Lystrup holds a bachelor’s in physics from Portland State University and attended graduate school at University College London earning a Ph.D. in astrophysics. As a planetary scientist and astronomer, Dr. Lystrup’s scientific work has been in using ground- and space-based astronomical observatories to understand the interactions and dynamics of planetary atmospheres and magnetospheres – the relationships between planets and their surrounding space environments.