Ginger Kerrick

First Latina Director of NASA Mission Control and 30-Year Veteran of the Johnson Space Center, Chief Strategy Officer of Barrios Technology, STEM Ambassador

Topics: STEM, Women Leaders, Corporate Culture, DE&I – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Emotional Intelligence, Innovation, Inspirational & Motivational, Leadership, Resilience, Business, Teamwork

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Biography

Ginger Kerrick shares her roadmap for building the teams that helped transform NASA’s fragmented culture, driving innovation and resilience.

During her 30-year tenure at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Ginger Kerrick led teams through waves of challenge and change during NASA’s most innovative decades since the Apollo missions, creating better cross-organizational collaboration and supporting NASA’s highly successful industry partnerships with SpaceX and others. Today she shares her insights, showing business leaders how to apply the NASA model of change management to build a culture designed for resilience and innovation.

Growing up in El Paso, Texas, in the 1980s, Ginger Kerrick wanted to be an astronaut. She overcame one hurdle after another to eventually get hired at NASA as an engineer and was finally invited to interview for the astronaut program, but a kidney stone condition meant a lifetime disqualification. She was crushed, but once she accepted what was beyond her control to change, she became unstoppable. She applied and was accepted to NASA’s elite cadre of Flight Directors at the helm of Mission Control and was the first Latina and the fifth woman in the agency’s history to do so. Ten years later, she moved into NASA senior leadership, supporting work on the International Space Station and then serving as Deputy Director of the Exploration Integration and Science Directorate.

Today, Ginger Kerrick is Chief Strategy Officer of Barrios Technology where she continues to partner with NASA and others on the rapidly developing space exploration economy. A vocal advocate for the importance of STEM careers and education, Kerrick has served as a part-time professor for the STEM MBA program at Texas Tech University’s Rawls College of Business, and she speaks frequently to both business leaders and students in STEM programs across the country. In 2016, Kerrick was one of five women named to the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 2019 she was sworn in as a member of the Texas Tech Board of Regents.

Ginger Kerrick was profiled in the Universal Pictures documentary The Wonderful: Stories from the International Space Station (2021) and in the book Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA’s Johnson Space Center (2021).

Videos

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Leadership Lessons from Mission Control

For almost 60 years, NASA’s Mission Control has been pulling off miracles on a regular basis. Ginger Kerrick gives audiences an insider’s look at the values and culture behind NASA’s ability to stay resilient, innovate and keep America’s astronauts safe.
With vivid stories from her own years at the helm of Mission Control, Kerrick celebrates the toughness and vigilance of her teams and offers lessons from her own evolution as a leader. Most importantly, she walks audiences through the wave of revitalization in the ranks of NASA leadership responsible for the successes of the past few decades — from the International Space Station to the SpaceX Crew Dragon and NASA’s return to the Moon with the Artemis program — showing leaders how they can leverage the Mission Control model in their own organizations to chart a course for growth, resilience, innovation and excellence, even in today’s rapidly-changing world.

Life is Hard: Woman Up!

Growing up in El Paso, Texas in the 1980’s, Ginger Kerrick wanted to be an astronaut. Despite sometimes overwhelming odds, she pursued her degree in physics and blazed her own trail to NASA. At the age of 26, she was finally invited to interview for the astronaut program—only to discover that kidney stones meant a lifetime disqualification.
Rather than embrace a mantra of victimhood, blame, or insecurity, Ginger Kerrick has embraced a “Woman Up” strategy of resilience throughout her life, meeting personal and professional challenges head-on. In this keynote, Kerrick shares stories of the challenges she has faced, including watching her father die at the age of 11, overcoming adversity as a woman in STEM, and the medical disqualification holding her back from her lifelong dream.
Using vivid examples of how her “Tough and Competent” approach to life has led to her success—including her history-making career as the first-ever Latina to lead NASA Mission Control as Flight Director—Kerrick provides strategies for organizations and individuals to turn obstacles into opportunities and to make their own “impossible” possible.