Aprille Ericsson
American mechanical engineer
Aprille Joy Ericsson (born April 1, 1963) is an American aerospace engineer who had served as the assistant secretary of defense for science and technology. Ericsson is the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Howard University and the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in engineering at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).
Early life
Aprille Ericsson was born and grew up in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend high school at the Cambridge School of Weston. She has said that her interest in astronautics manifested at an early age; she recalled watching the Apollo missions when she was in the second grade. Ericsson’s dream of entering the Astronaut Program in NASA came to an end as she has asthma and has an issue with her knee. In the summer of 1980 as a junior in high school, she attended MIT UNITE (now called MITES, Minority Introduction to Engineering & Science), an engineering outreach program for minority students at MIT. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering at MIT in 1986. She was then awarded a master's degree in engineering from Howard University in 1990, followed by a doctorate in mechanical engineering, the first African-American woman to do so.
Career and teaching
While attending graduate school at Howard University, Ericsson accepted an aerospace engineer position at the NASA Goddard Flight Center in Maryland. Ericsson has served as an engineer, technologist, instrument lead, and project and program manager at NASA for more than 30 years, lending her technical and managerial expertise to projects including the James Webb Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), and the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2). Until recently, she was the new business lead for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Instrument Systems and Technology Division, which connects scientists and project managers with the instrument technologies they need to accomplish their missions.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16195050. VIAF identifies the subject as 36561776. The Library of Congress control number is no2001012139. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1980, 1986 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aprille Ericsson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.