Jennifer Gustetic

Ms. Gustetic’s experience has focused on the public sector with concentrations on research and development, open innovation, prizes and challenges, open government, public private partnerships, grants management, and technology policy. Currently, Ms. Gustetic is the Program Executive for Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR/STTR) at NASA.

Ms. Gustetic speaks often at events and has also authored several papers on many topics including open innovation, security policy, harnessing public-private partnerships to optimize public service delivery, the evolution of e-democracy, and technical topics such as non-contact thickness measurements of luminescent photoelastic coatings.

As described by Popular Mechanics in August 2014: “In 2012, [NASA] also hired Jenn Gustetic, a vivacious woman with an aerospace engineering degree and a master’s in technology policy from MIT, to engage the public as the first-ever Challenges and Prizes program executive. In this role, Gustetic, 32, uses her brains, charm, and wicked networking skills to increase grassroots participation in NASA’s far-ranging mission. In the process, she’s breaking down the wall that once separated a massive bureaucracy from the people it was supposed to serve.”