Veenarakesh Nagaraja Rao

Ms. Veena Nagaraja Rao has 23 years of experience with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in design and development of Indigenous, Innovative Space systems. She currently leads and directs the design and engineering group at Centum Electronics, a space and defense company based in Bangalore. During her time at ISRO, she was recognized for her highly innovative indigenous creativity in the field of technology and was presented with various awards, including "Best Woman Scientist" by the Astronautical Society of India. Ms. Veena was responsible for the design, development of the space sustainability ratings for almost 20 satellites including Chandrayaana-1 and Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM). She was also responsible for the design, development of state-of-the-art Solid State Recorders (SSR) with optimized weight, volume and power, envying fault tolerant /graceful degradation feature. She has produced remarkable techniques for the usage of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) memory modules as the basic storage units. She received a Masters in Electronics Engineering from Bangalore University, then joined the ISRO Satellite Centre in September 1991. She is originally from Bangaluru, Karnataka, India.