Luis Pedraza currently serves as a Strategic Missions Program Manager for the U.S. Air Force and Missile Defense Strategic Systems program office at Draper. Luis reports to the Vice President with responsibilities such as project execution and operations. In this role, Luis is also responsible for pairing customer needs in missile defense and hypersonic business areas with innovative engineering solutions and managing efforts to ensure project success. Luis leads with humility and respect, fostering an inclusive environment that leverages the strengths and perspectives of team members to achieve success. Luis is the founder of the Circle Mentoring Group program that emphasizes inclusive, multilevel, and omnidirectional mentorship. As part of the mentoring program, Luis facilitates discussions on best management practices for program planning, schedule development and execution, earned value management, risks and opportunities management, customer engagement, and proposal development. This mentoring platform serves as a curriculum to train the next generation of innovators that will carry on Draper’s legacy.Prior to Luis’ career in program management, he served the organization as a Sensor Test Engineer. As a task lead, Luis was responsible for the lifecycle development of guidance, navigation, and control systems. Before Draper, Luis served as an Aerospace Engineer at Parsons Corporation where he provided technical assessments on missile subcomponents to determine their capabilities and deficiencies. In this role, Luis led the structural failure analyses on ballistic missiles to determine their survivability in hypersonic flights.Prior to Luis’ career in program management and engineering, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as Logistics Specialist, where he earned recognition for providing humanitarian assistance to Japan in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear disaster in 2011. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy and the University of Alabama, Luis continued serving the Department of Defense, helping it solve some of its most challenging engineering problems.