Tahani Amer

Tahani Amer is an Egyptian-American aerospace engineer who serves as the executive for the Earth Science Division of NASA Headquarters' Science Mission Directorate. Born in a suburb of Cairo, she was encouraged by her father to pursue engineering, and she moved to the United States as a young mother with two children, speaking no English at first. She completed her undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering at Old Dominion University, where an internship with NASA introduced her to computational fluid dynamics, and she stayed on for graduate work in aerospace engineering, with doctoral research on risk factors in NASA missions. Returning to NASA, she developed instruments to measure fuselage drag in wind tunnels and later oversaw missions including Surface Water and Ocean Topography, CLARREO and GeoCarb. She received the 2014 NASA Public Service Award and the 2022 Award for Science from the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, and she has campaigned to improve the representation of women in engineering.