Profile Details
Dr. Justin Trammell is a co-chair of the engineering steering committee, which is tasked with identifying and responding to issues of strategic importance for engineering work that is conducted at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). He and his co-chair provide feedback about engineering procedures, processes, and practices to the director and STScI leadership.
As a principal project engineer at the institute, Dr. Trammell manages project- and program-level technical engineering efforts for the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the soon-to-launch Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and a concept for NASA’s next astrophysics flagship mission, the Habitable Worlds Observatory. He is the technical lead for model-based systems engineering and digital engineering evolution, and a member of our cloud architecture review board. He is also an adjunct professor at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland.
Before he joined STScI, Dr. Trammell was a modeling and simulation principal engineer at SAIC in Arlington, Virginia, from 2022 to 2024. There, he contributed to several Department of Defense contracts, including model-based systems engineering deployment into physical systems and promoting test automation. He also led systems engineering initiatives to develop new architectures for research and development. While at Aerotek/Northrop Grumman in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the year before, he was a senior systems test analyst assigned to work for the Missile Defense Agency.
From 2017 to 2021, he was a senior systems engineer at L3Harris in Arlington, Texas. There, Dr. Trammell worked to optimize modeling and simulation data pipelines through advanced artificial intelligence (AI) integration, and led research and development for an array of military aircraft flight simulators and advanced avionics. While there, he also participated in outreach projects to help cultivate the next generations of engineers and scientists. As a systems verification engineer at Battelle Ecology Inc., a national ecological observatory network in Boulder, Colorado, from 2014 to 2017, he led a team of software developers to ensure that raw data products were processed, calibrated, and released for scientific research. He also supported field operations and remote troubleshooting of complex data collection for over 80 remote ecology sites across the U.S.
From 2012 to 2014, he was both a research and teaching assistant at the University of Houston in Texas while pursuing his doctorate in atmospheric science. His independent PhD research focused on extensive imaging spectroscopy peering down into Saturn’s turbulent layer, and image processing and calibration from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, which included an in-depth analysis of hardware and data retrieval techniques of its imaging science subsystem. One notable finding included the identification a dramatic reduction in Northern Hemispheric vortex structures leading up to Saturn’s equinox, which validated seasonal variations in hurricane-like structures on Saturn.
Dr. Trammell has also served as a systems engineer at Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he supported the development of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) still docked on the International Space Station. Additionally, he participated as a summer researcher at the Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and a researcher at NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program in Irvine.
Throughout his career, he has also taught courses at Texas A&M Texarkana and Front Range Community College in Longmont, Colorado. Dr. Trammell has given talks about Saturn’s atmosphere and Cassini’s imaging at the Southwest Research Institute and the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences, respectively. He has also presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU), International Astronautical Congress, and NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program. He has published papers in AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters, Icarus, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and the Journal of the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers.
Education:
PhD in Atmospheric Science, University of Houston, Texas
MS in Space Architecture, University of Houston, Texas
BS in Physics, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas