Dr. Shawn Domagal-Goldman

Shawn Domagal-Goldman is the Acting Astrophysics Division Director at NASA HQ. Formerly he was the Deputy Director of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate (SED) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, an organization that leads science teams for space missions and conducts world-class research across the space sciences disciplines. One of the missions he works on is the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a flagship-class space telescope concept that will tell the story of life in the universe by studying how the universe led to potentially habitable worlds, identifying habitable worlds beyond our solar system, and searching those worlds for signs of life. Shawn’s research background is as an astrobiologist that has been a member of multiple interdisciplinary teams that conduct research on the standards of evidence for biosignatures and assessment of exoplanet habitability. He does that from a systems perspective, applying cross-disciplinary lessons he learned as an Earth scientist by training, as a planetary science at NASA, and on teams studying a variety of astrophysics mission concepts. This includes serving as a Science and Technology Definition Team member for the Habitable Exoplanets Observatory (HabEx) and as the Deputy Study Scientist for the Large UV-Optical-Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR), the two concepts that led to a decadal survey recommendation to prioritize HWO.