Dr. David Chenette has accepted the position of Director for NASA's Science  Mission Directorate Heliophysics Division. His appointment to this position is effective September 30, 2013.
 
Dr. Chenette comes to NASA from the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto, Calif., where he is currently the ATC Chief Scientist.  Before that assignment, he led the ATC Space Sciences and Instrumentation Directorate, and managed both the Solar and Astrophysics and the Space Physics Laboratories of that directorate during a time when they performed a wide variety of NASA Heliophysics missions and instrument development projects. These included the early stages of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) Small Explorer, the AIA and HMI instruments for the Solar Dynamics Observatory, components for the Interstellar Boundary Explorer and the Magnetospheric Multiscale HPCA, and many others.
 
During NASA’s International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) program, Dr. Chenette was the Principal Investigator for the Polar Ionospheric X-ray Imaging Experiment (PIXIE), and previous to that, he led Lockheed’s contributions to the UARS Particle Environment Monitor, including another Auroral X-ray Imager (AXIS). Before joining Lockheed, he managed the development of a set of radiation belt sensors for the joint NASA/USAF Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite (CRRES), as a member of the technical staff at The Aerospace Corporation. Dr. Chenette began his career in space physics as a self-proclaimed “explorer of the heliosphere,” with the honor of participating in the first encounters of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, first with the University of Chicago team on Pioneers 10 and 11, where he earned his Ph.D., and then on Voyagers 1 and 2 as a post-doc with the Caltech/Goddard team. 

September, 2013.