On April 28, Head of School Bryan Garman announced Andrea Razzaghi ’78 as the 2025 Commencement speaker. This announcement came roughly one month before the seniors’ graduation ceremony in June.
Razzaghi is an engineer and astrophysicist who has made significant contributions to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). She began her career at NASA in 1985 after working as a Navy contractor in the private sector and now serves as the director of the NASA Office of JPL Management Oversight (NOJMO) at JPL.
After graduating from Sidwell, Razzaghi earned her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Brown University and her master’s degree from The Catholic University of America. In 1985, she began her NASA career at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
From 1996 until 1997, Razzaghi worked as a White House senior policy analyst under the Clinton Administration. In that role, she coordinated projects from the National Science and Technology Council and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
In 2010, she returned to NASA, serving as Assistant Director of Planetary Science until 2012 before becoming the deputy director of astrophysics from 2012 to 2018. As Deputy Director, she oversaw more than 20 projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s first-ever exoplanet mission, Kepler.
According to NASA, Razzaghi also led several important mission milestones, including the launches of the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, as well as NASA’s contributions to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hitomi mission and the European Space Agency’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Pathfinder.
Razzaghi has also persevered through the challenges of being a woman of color in engineering. According to Razzaghi, when she was hired at NASA, she encountered discriminatory dynamics; she was the only woman in a group of 50 engineers and was one of three people of color.
In a 2022 interview on the “Are You Okay” podcast, Razzaghi told host Dr. Lucy McBride about two moments when she faced gender discrimination.
Razzaghi explained to McBride that when she was working at NASA, a man from another division kept trying to prove that she was incorrect about something in a project they were working on. When Razzaghi tried to explain her method, he interrupted and claimed she did not know what she was doing. Even after she proved him wrong, he never apologized or acknowledged his actions.
Razzaghi also spoke about when her colleague claimed that beautiful women could not be engineers.
In the same “Are You Okay” interview, Razzaghi said, “I demystified for them what it meant to be a woman of color in their environment, and then I became just another one of their engineering colleagues.” Despite the discrimination Razzaghi faced, she learned valuable lessons of leadership, tenacity and determination.
“Being a member of the Sidwell community is an important part of my life,” she said in a letter to the Upper School. “My time as a Sidwell student encouraged me not to put myself or others in a box, and to be curious about how we all fit into and contribute to our shared world.”
In her upcoming Commencement speech, she hopes to share some of these lessons and values, along with her passion for space science, engineering and discovery with the 2025 graduating class.
