Gabrielle Hedrick, Ph.D.

Gabrielle Hedrick is an aerospace engineer at MITRE, with over 10 years of prior NASA experience in planetary exploration. Her research focuses on space traffic coordination, launch and reentry, human spaceflight, and cislunar space, including security in cislunar as part of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Space ISAC). After spearheading its creation, she became chair of its Cislunar Affinity Group, which doubles as the Security Working Group for the American Institute of Aeronautic and Astronautic (AIAA) Cislunar Ecosystem Task Force. She led the development of a course series on cislunar challenges and opportunities in partnership with the Space ISAC and AIAA that includes topics such as space weather, space law, and lunar geodesy. She is also an emergency medical technician, firefighter, and ski patroller—expertise that she draws from as part of her research on safety of humans in space. 

Hedrick has a master’s degree in mining engineering, for which she spent a year mining gold in the Amazon Rainforest; a master’s degree in planetary sciences, focused on long-term planning for the NASA Mars rover Opportunity; and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering with a dissertation centered around terrain-aware path planning for the NASA Mars Sample Return rover.