Washington, D.C.
Michelle Thaller is the assistant director of science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She has a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from Harvard and a PhD from Georgia State University. After a post-doctoral research fellowship at Caltech, she became interested in public outreach and science communication and served as the public outreach lead for the Spitzer Space Telescope at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before moving to Goddard in 2009.
Thaller has worked at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on strategic communications. She is one of the regular hosts of the Discovery Science Channel’s How the Universe Works and Space's Deepest Secrets. She hosts the podcast Orbital Path on public radio. She has received several high-profile awards for online science journalism and science leadership.