Dr. Bhavya Lal
Bhavya is the former Associate Administrator for technology, policy, and strategy within the office of the NASA Administrator, and responsible for providing evidence-driven advice to NASA leadership on internal and external policy issues, strategic planning, and technology investments.
Prior to her Associate Administrator role and in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration, Lal was the acting Chief of Staff at NASA and directed the agency’s transition under the administration of President Biden. Before arriving at NASA, she was a member of the Presidential Transition Agency Review Teams for both NASA and the Department of Defense. For 15 years prior to that, Dr. Lal led strategy, technology assessment, and policy studies and analyses at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI). Before coming to IDA, Lal was Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Studies at Abt Associates, a global policy research and consulting firm based in Cambridge, MA.
Dr. Lal is an active member of the space technology and policy community, having chaired, co-chaired, or served on six high-impact National Academy of Sciences (NAS) ad hoc committees. She served two consecutive terms on the NOAA Federal Advisory Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing (ACCRES), was an External Council Member of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, and was selected to join the NASA Technology, Innovation and Engineering Advisory Committee (NAC/TIE). She co-founded and co-chaired the policy track of the American Nuclear Society’s annual conference on Nuclear and Emerging Technologies in Space (NETS). She guest lectures at universities across the country including MIT, Georgetown, Arizona State, Syracuse, and others, and has testified multiple times to Congress and the National Space Council. Dr. Lal’s analyses have been at the center of almost all space-relevant policies for the last decade. For her outstanding contributions to the development of astronautics, she was nominated and selected to be a Member “Academician” of the International Academy of Astronautics, as well as inducted into the YWCA’s Academy of Women Achievers.