Jennifer Harris Trosper

Jennifer Harris Trosper is a distinguished JPL Fellow and the laboratory lead for Mission Protection and Resilience in the Office of Project Engineering Management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. She also leads the Rover Operations Center (ROC) at JPL, spearheading the infusion of Artificial Intelligence into JPL operating missions and collaborates with “New Space” and AI industry leaders to drive cost reductions and operational efficiencies across the laboratory.

With a career spanning over 30 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Trosper has held critical engineering leadership roles on every spacecraft ever to have roved the surface of Mars. Most recently, she served as the Project Manager for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter teams. Her leadership was instrumental throughout the mission’s lifecycle, from overseeing the design of autonomous capabilities as the Mission System Development Manager to managing the Project-wide systems engineering teams through launch and surface operations. 

Beyond the Red Planet, Trosper also served as the Integrated Systems Engineering Manager for the Psyche mission, where she was responsible for the verification and validation of the flight vehicle prior to its 2023 launch. Her extensive portfolio also includes leadership roles on the Mars Science Lab (Curiosity), SMAP, and the Mars Pathfinder missions.

Trosper’s technical foundation began as a power subsystem engineer before transitioning into attitude control, command data handling, and testbed engineering. This end-to-end expertise in complex systems has been the hallmark of her success and led to her being named a JPL Fellow in 2013. She holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from MIT and a master’s degree from the University of Southern California. Originally raised on a farm in Ohio, she was inspired to pursue space exploration by her father’s stories of rocket launches during his service in the Army Corps of Engineers.

J-D Yoder, Ph.D.

John-David (J-D) Yoder has served as Dean of the T.J. Smull College of Engineering at Ohio Northern University (ONU) since 2017 and previously served as Chair of mechanical engineering. Before joining ONU, he was Proposal Engineering Supervisor at Grob System Inc. He has held numerous leadership and advisory positions in various entrepreneurial ventures. Yoder is listed as inventor on 11 patents and has over 50 peer-reviewed publications. He has had the privilege of serving as a Faculty Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and an Invited Professor at INRIA Rhone-Alpes in Monbonnot, France. Yoder’s research interests include computer vision, mobile robotics, intelligent vehicles, entrepreneurship and engineering education.

Yoder has been an active member of the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) since its founding over 20 years ago, and currently serves on the KEEN Leadership Council as well as being one of the founding facilitators for the Entrepreneurial Mindset for Future University Engineering Leaders (EM-FUEL) leadership development program, which aims to develop nearly 1,000 leaders over the next decade. He has served as both secretary and chair of the Ohio Engineering Deans Council. At the national level, he is a member of the Executive Committee of the Engineering Deans Council and is past chair of the Undergraduate Experience Committee of the Engineering Deans Council. Yoder earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.