Keynote Address

Biography: Nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate, Michael Griffin began his duties as the 11th Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on April 14, 2005. As Administrator, he leads the NASA team and manages its resources to advance the U.S. Vision for Space Exploration. Prior to being nominated as NASA Administrator, Griffin was serving as Space Department Head at Johns Hopkins University\u27s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. He was previously President and Chief Operating Officer of In-Q-Tel, Inc., and also served in several positions within Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va., including Chief Executive Officer of Orbital\u27s Magellan Systems division and General Manager of the Space Systems Group. Earlier in his career, Griffin served as chief engineer and as associate administrator for Exploration at NASA, and as deputy for technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. He has been an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington University, where he taught courses in spacecraft design, applied mathematics, guidance and navigation, compressible flow, computational fluid dynamics, spacecraft attitude control, astrodynamics and introductory aerospace engineering. He is the lead author of more than two dozen technical papers, as well as the textbook, Space Vehicle Design