BROOKE OWENS FELLOWSHIP EXECUTIVE TEAM THANKS TRUJILLO, WELCOMES BACK GARVER
13 JANUARY 2023 | The Brooke Owens Fellowship – the award-winning, non-profit program that provides paid internships and executive mentorship to exceptional undergraduate women and gender minorities in aerospace – is announcing a change to its leadership team, thanking Diana Trujillo for her extraordinary service and welcoming back Co-Founder Lori Garver.
Diana Trujillo, Former Mars Perseverance Mission Lead at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will step back from her day-to-day responsibilities in the Brooke Owens Fellowship as a member of the Executive Leadership team. In over two years on the team, she has welcomed three classes of Brookies with the team and left indelible lessons of leadership and growth on each class and in the alumni community.
“It has been a complete joy and privilege to be part of this organization surrounded by incredible humans in honor of our friend Brooke Owens,” Trujillo said, reflecting on her involvement with the organization. “The positive and uplifting change that we continue to make in the aerospace industry helping each other do better, be better and go after what we are meant to be, makes this community magical and special. As I step down to focus on my new position supporting Human Spaceflight in Houston, I will cherish every moment we had together, and I cannot wait to see each of our Fellows again making waves in the industry.”
The Brooke Owens Fellowship welcomes the Honorable Lori Garver, former Deputy Administrator of NASA and Brooke Owens Fellowship Co-Founder, back onto the team. Garver, who transitioned out of her day-to-day responsibilities with the Fellowship in 2020, will join Will Pomerantz, Caroline Juang, Kayla Watson, and Emily Calandrelli on the Executive Team alongside the program’s first full-time Operations Director, Ginny Randall. “Having stepped aside from a decision making role to make way for new leaders a few years ago, I’m thrilled to be returning to work more closely with the expanded team,” Garver said. “As the organization continues its quest to transform the aerospace workforce, I remain dedicated to advancing these important goals.”
Garver has served in several senior aerospace positions throughout her career, including Deputy Administrator of NASA, General Manager of the Air Line Pilots Association, and CEO of Earthrise Alliance. She is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, a member of the Board of Directors of Hydrosat, an advisor to Sierra Space, Bessemer Venture Partners, K2 Space, World View, and Orbite Space. Her memoir, Escaping Gravity, was published in 2022.
The Brooke Owens Fellowship was founded in 2016 and has undergone significant growth over the course of seven years. Generous grants and donations from Blue Origin’s Club for the Future and aerospace industry leader Dylan Taylor have accelerated the program’s growth, allowing the leadership team to expand its Summit programming, strengthen its alumni community, and partner with the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship to hire Operations Director Randall in summer 2022. The Fellowship continued its legacy of improving diversity, equity, and inclusion for women and gender minorities with the recruitment and application process for the Class of 2023, which included screening and interviews from Pomerantz, Juang, Watson, Calandrelli, Trujillo, Garver, and other members of the extended Brooke Owens Fellowship alumni and network of support, as well as interviews from partnering Host Companies. The other spinoff sibling programs inspired by the Brooke Owens Fellowship, the Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship Program, the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship, and the Zenith Canada Pathways Foundation are in the midst of finishing up their internship recruitment.
The Brooke Owens Fellowship will announce their Class of 2023 by the end of this month. The continued evolution of the Brooke Owens Fellowship Executive Team, with returning member Garver, will drive the program’s commitment to inspiring, recruiting, including, and uplifting underrepresented communities in aerospace.
###
ABOUT THE BROOKE OWENS FELLOWSHIP
The Brooke Owens Fellowship is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to providing career opportunities and both personal and professional growth for women and gender-minority college and university students in the aerospace industry. The program offers paid internships at the nation’s leading aerospace institutions; executive-level mentorship from astronauts, CEOs, and more; and a community of supportive peers and industry leaders to an annual class of approximately 40-50 Fellows. Since the program’s founding in 2016 -- shortly after the death of the program’s namesake, beloved aerospace industry professional D. Brooke Owens -- the Brooke Owens Fellowship has been awarded to 249 deserving students representing thirteen countries. The program is run by a volunteer 5-person Executive Leadership Team and a full-time Operations Director. The Brooke Owens Fellowship is the recipient of the 2017 American Astronautical Society’s Patti Grace Smith Award, the 2018 Space Frontier Foundation’s Stakeholder Expansion Award, and both the Readers’ Choice and the Editors’ Choice for the Unsung Hero of the Year Award from the 2019 SpaceNews Awards for Excellence & Innovation.