Nagin Cox

After graduating, Cox worked for the United States Air Force as a space operations officer, in F-16 aircrew training.^[6] She also worked as an orbital analyst at the North American Aerospace Defense Command.^[5] Cox has worked as a spacecraft operations engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1993^[5] and has been involved with several interplanetary robotic missions, including Galileo, InSight, Kepler, and the Mars Curiosity rover.^[7] She is a tactical mission lead, in charge of the uplink, downlink, and advance planning teams.^[8] Asteroid 14061 Nagincox, discovered in 1996, was named after her in 2015.^[9] She won the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, the Bruce Murray award in 2014 and has won the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal twice.^[10][11][12]

Cox is passionate about increasing diversity within sciences, engineering and NASA.^{[13][14][15][16][17]} She served on the board of directors at Griffith Observatory,^[18] as well as on the President's Council for Cornell Women Alumni.^[19] She is an invited speaker for the United States Department of State, travelling the world and talking about her career and NASA's robotic space exploration program.^[20] In 2014, she visited Pakistan, Rio de Janeiro, and Bahia, inspiring young women from unprivileged communities to study sciences and engineering.^[21] She was a keynote speaker at SIGGRAPH 2016^[22][23] and visited Bosnia and Herzegovina in the same year, touring the country with the United States Department of State.^[24][25] She gave a TEDx talk at Beacon Street in 2017, which was later chosen by Wired as one of the best science talks.^[26][27] "What time is it on Mars?" has been viewed almost two million times.^[28] She visited Kuwait in 2018, discussing their 2021 Mars mission.^[29][30]