Shelly Calabrisi

Shelly Calabrisi

Fellowship Placement: National Science Foundation
Cohort: 2011-2012

Shelly Calabrisi Originally from Dover, OK, Shelly earned her BS in Physics-Space Science (Chemistry & Math Minors) from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1999 and her MS in Physics (Chemical Engineering Minor) from University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2001. In 2006, the 1998 HC96 Asteroid was renamed 22586 Shellyhynes for Shelly’s work with an Intel Science Talent Search Finalist.

After teaching Astronomy and Physics for a decade at the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, Shelly was awarded the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship in 2011-2012 with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs. The fellowship then led to the opportunity in 2012, where she began serving as Science and Technical Project Services Supervisor – at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica plus serving as the 2013–2014 Winter Site Manager, managing the Station for 13 months during the Austral Winter Season before continuing her S&TPS Supervisor position. As the S&TPS supervisor, Shelly provided technical support to all NSF-funded grantees performing work at the South Pole.

Shelly moved to the NASA Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCARB) mission for three years as the Deputy Project Manager before transferring to the Atmosphere Observing System (AOS) administered by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD as an Instrument PM. Shelly managed two instruments on the AOS-Sky mission and also worked on the spacecraft that houses the Precipitation Measuring Mission (PMM), a collaborative instrument built by the Japanese Space Agency and due to launch in 2029. The AOS objectives are to provide transformative space-based and suborbital observations of cloud, convection, precipitation, and aerosol processes, and to enable applications resulting in improved predictions of weather, air quality, and climate for the benefit of society.

Shelly recently accepted a position at the Space Telescope Science Institute as the Mission DPM for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), now 4 years into its primary mission, located at the L2 Lagrange point.