Background
Michael Goodman is an associate program manager for the Disasters program area of NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Program. During his 38-year career with NASA he has served a variety of roles. His primary science interests have been in passive microwave atmospheric research, with an emphasis on applications to severe storms and tropical cyclones. He has participated in well over a dozen airborne field campaigns that have taken him around the globe, including Brazil, Costa Rica, Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, Cape Verde, Cold Lake in Alberta, and Fairbanks, Alaska.G
Goodman was founding member of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC), which is one of twelve NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). He has served as both the DAAC scientist and manager of the GHRC at different points from 1991 to 2009.
In 2009 Goodman left MSFC for a two-year appointment at NASA Headquarters (HQ) as program manager for the Disasters program area of NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Program. He focused the program on using NASA’s spaceborne and airborne remote sensing observations, modeling, and analysis to improve forecasting, mitigation, and response to natural and technological disasters. During his time at NASA HQ, the Disasters program area aided response efforts for many national and international disasters including a devastating earthquake in Haiti, the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland, the months-long BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Tohoku-Sendai earthquake and tsunami in Japan. NASA aided response and recovery efforts for these and other disasters by using spaceborne and airborne instruments to observe, process, analyze and provide data products to first responders and local stakeholder agencies to help identify, inform and mitigate the impacts of the disasters.
In 2011 Goodman returned to MSFC and served as assistant manager for the Earth Sciences branch, before again being called back to NASA HQ in 2014, this time to serve a one-year appointment as the program executive of the Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) which oversees the operations of all twelve NASA DAACs. In 2015, upon completion of his HQ appointment, Goodman returned to MSFC and now serves as the deputy manager and assistant manager for the MSFC Science Research and Projects Division. In these roles he is responsible for many of the day-to-day operations of the division that oversees Earth Science, Astrophysics, Heliophysics, and Planetary Science research at Marshall Space Flight Center.
Michael received a M.S. in Atmospheric Science from Florida State University and a B.A. in Environmental Science from the University of Virginia.