Vanessa Kuroda
Area of Expertise
Pillars of Positivity, Inspiring Emotional Intelligence, Profitable Philanthropy, Winning the Work-Life Balance, Improving Communication Habits, Actions and Accountability, Driving Idea Generation, Transformational Vs. Transactional Leadership
Lead System Engineer
Outpost
Vanessa Kuroda is excited to join Outpost as their Lead Mission Systems Engineer, building on her experience as an aerospace communications systems engineer in many different capacities, including Mission Operations, Integration & Test, and Systems Engineering for novel aerospace vehicles across the industry, from lunar spacecraft at NASA to hypersonic aircraft at Stratolaunch Systems and drones at Airbus’s Silicon Valley Innovation center A^3.
She was most recently the RF Team Lead & Sr RF Systems Engineer for Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy lift orbital rocket, and the Staff Telemetry & (RF) Comms Engineer for Stratolaunch Systems, which is building hypersonic aircraft from the ground up.
She earned her B.S. & M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California with an emphasis on Communications Systems. After internships at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, she became the primary Spacecraft Comms Engineer at NASA’s Ames, where she performed integration, test, and mission operations for the LADEE spacecraft which orbited the moon, performed science experiments, and demonstrated the fastest laser comms link in space at the time.
She was also selected as one of 40 across all of NASA to participate in their FIRST leadership development program and during her tenure at NASA, was chosen by Silicon Valley’s Business Journal as one of their 40 Under 40 Rising Stars. At Airbus, she was their Wireless & Comms Architect on UAS Traffic Management (UTM), and helped to create the wireless communications ecosystem needed to safely integrate unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into airspace systems globally.
In addition to her engineering work, she stays active in engineering organizations and participates in STEM activities as much as she can. She is also a hip-hop dancer with a talent agency in San Francisco and previously at USC, where she performed as a backup dancer for the Black Eyed Peas at the Kids’ Choice Awards.
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