Janice L. Buckner is Program Executive in NASA Headquarters Planetary Science Division. She attended Howard University and graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering. If you ask her she’ll tell you that her ideal career was to work for NASA. After graduating from Howard she got just that chance. In 1983, she began work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the Parts Engineer Branch and was the only technical woman in her office. She also represented one-tenth of the African American women engineers at Goddard upon her arrival. She supported several NASA flight projects as an Electronics Engineer and quickly advanced into a Quality Assurance Engineering position. She still has fond memories of working on projects such as the Cosmic Background Experiment (COBE), Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Program, and the Earth Observing Satellite (EOS) Program. While raising two children and completing her MS in Engineering Management at George Washington University she accepted a position as a Flight Assurance Manager for the Landsat 7 Mission that was launched in 1999. Still excited about this accomplishment she decided to take a new direction in her career path. She accepted a Technology Program Management position in a co-located NASA Headquarters office at Goddard known as the Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO). While in ESTO she managed the Advanced Component Technology (ACT) Program and the Instrument Incubator Program (IIP). Her efforts have resulted in the support of numerous Earth Science instrument systems that are in orbit today. Janice is currently working at NASA Headquarters in the Planetary Science Division. She is the Program Executive of the Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations (PICASSO) Program, Maturation of Instruments for Solar System Exploration (MatISSE) Program and the Small and Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) Program.