Dr. Sid Ahmed Boukabara

Sid Ahmed Boukabara currently serves as the senior program scientist for strategy of the Earth Science Division (ESD) within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD). He has been a member of the ESD leadership team since April 2023, supporting the Director and Deputy Director in framing and executing NASA Earth Science strategy and the multi-agency collaboration efforts. As senior program scientist, he is also responsible for facilitating strategic science initiatives that require coordination across multiple elements of ESD encompassing technology, flights, data systems, research and earth action.

Dr Boukabara has 29 years of cumulated experience in satellite remote sensing design, research and related applications. Eighteen of those years were spent with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) where he was the principal scientist at the Office of Systems Architecture and Advanced Planning, supporting the effort to plan, design and evolve the Nation's operational space and ground architectures of the future. In addition, he has held numerous positions including that of deputy director and acting director for the multi-agency U.S. Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation as well as acting deputy director of the Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR).

Between 2015 and 2017 he served as senior policy advisor to the Commerce Department’s Assistant Secretary for Environmental Observing Systems and Prediction, providing scientific perspectives to decision- and policy-making. Prior to joining NOAA, he spent seven years in the private sector as a scientist in Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER Inc.) in the Boston, MA area where he worked on the development of various algorithms and radiative transfer models applicable to several types of satellites observing systems.

Sid’s academic training is in Electrical Engineering and Satellite Remote Sensing (EE degree from Ecole Nationale d’Aviation Civile in Toulouse, France, 1994; M.S. in Signal processing from Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, 1994; Ph.D. in Satellite Remote Sensing, Paris University, France, 1997).

He has represented NOAA and now NASA in various technical commissions of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and has been an active participant in the Joint Expert Team on Earth Observation System Design and Evolution (JET-EOSDE). He served as chair and co-chair of several international workshops including the first and second NOAA workshops on Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Environmental Sciences as well as WMO’s international workshops on the Impact of Various Observing Systems on NWP and Earth System Prediction.

He has received numerous awards including two bronze medals from the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2009 and 2022 respectively as well the NOAA vision and creativity award in 2020. He was recognized for outstanding contribution by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) committee on Artificial Intelligence and was recognized as employee of the year by NOAA HQ leadership for his work on policy. Sid has published or co-authored more than 70 papers in peer-review journals and authored or contributed to numerous reports, algorithm theoretical basis documents and book chapters.

In addition, he has attended the Leadership training program at the Federal Executive Institute in 2016 in Charlottesville, Virginia, and completed the Harvard University Senior Executive Follow Program in 2020 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Sid likes to spend time with family and friends and loves Mediterranean cooking, gardening, biking, warm weather and taking long road trips. He lives in Maryland with his sons and daughters in the Washington, D.C. suburb. He is originally from Algiers, Algeria and longs to one day go back to visit the awe-inspiring Hoggar mountains and the prehistoric engravings of the Tassili region.