Usha Guduri

Mars 2020 Subsystem Lead, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

291 - FLY ME TO THE MOON: SUBORBITAL SPACE = THE JUMP POINT FOR SPACE EXPLORATION

Usha Guduri is the Planning and Sequencing Subsystem Manager for the next Mars mission launching in 2020. As a Software Systems Engineer, she also managed and architected several software projects for missions including Cassini, SMAP, and Mars Science Laboratory in the last three years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Over the past couple years she has been working on her own startup: Silent Legends, building games that redefine the Collectible Card genre and leverage the medium to make learning fun and transparent to kids.

Ms. Guduri has 15 years experience in Software Development and Technical Leadership - building secure, scalable, and performance-optimized systems to support websites visited by hundreds of thousands of users each month, including several in the TripAdvisor portfolio. As if she cannot find enough to keep her challenged at work, she goes about giving NPOs a Cyber presence in her own time. Ms. Guduri also loves wrangling with data and is known for winning Hackathons with her novel visualizations. During her days off she is generally camping and hiking at one of the National Parks or parked with a good book in hand, and is looking forward to sharing the outdoors with her 18-month old daughter.

Ms. Guduri is an alumna of BITS (Pilani), a premier institute in India, and USC's Viterbi School of Engineering.