Lori Magruder

Dr. Lori Magruder is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics department and the Associate Director at UT Center for Space Research. She leads the remote sensing group within the UT Center for Space Research. Her research is primarily dedicated to remote sensing instrumentation, implementation, validation and 3D geospatial data exploitation. Dr. Magruder received her bachelor’s degree from The University of Southern California in Aerospace Engineering and her master’s degree from Princeton University in Mechanical an Aerospace Engineering. Her Ph.D. was earned from The University of Texas at Austin with a focus on ground-based validation techniques for NASA’s ICESat (Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite) mission.

She has held positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory prior to returning to UT Austin. Dr. Magruder has been the ICESat-2 Science Team lead since 2014 and has supported this mission through pre-launch development, launch and now on-orbit operations. In addition to her leadership responsibilities within ICESat-2 and scientific studies for space-based laser altimetry, Dr. Magruder leads many other NASA and the Department of Defense programs with her expertise in geospatial topics with a unique link between engineering and science applications through remote sensing.