Dr. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal has served as the JSC Historian since 2004. In this position she provides reference assistance to NASA and the public and has shared her expertise with journalists, writers, broadcasting agencies, documentarians, and many others. She was awarded her Ph.D. from Washington State University, her master's in History from New Mexico State University, and B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of Arizona.
Jennifer holds the unique distinction of being a scholar of NASA history and women’s history. She has been featured as a subject matter expert in several documentaries; is an accomplished oral historian; and authored many publications. In 2015, the Texas State Historical Association awarded the Liz Carpenter Award for Research to Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, a book containing her chapter on Mae Jemison, the first female astronaut of color. In 2012, Jennifer was awarded the Charles Thomson Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government for her chapter focusing on the Shuttle accidents in NASA’s Wings In Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle. Her essay, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: The First Six Women Astronauts and the Media,” was included in Spacefarers: Images of Astronauts and Cosmonauts in the Heroic Era of Spaceflight (2013) and noted as “fascinating and an in-depth study on how the first group of NASA women dealt with the still occasionally sexist media.” For this work, she received her second Thomson Prize in three years.
In 2011 she published her first book, Winning the West for Women, a biography of suffragist, Emma Smith DeVoe. That same year, she was recognized by NASA Headquarters for her outstanding work as a historian for the Agency. Her latest manuscript, Making Space for Women, focuses on the history of JSC through the experiences of its female employees and will be published this fall through Texas A&M Press.
