Tony Sanders entered the Senior Executive Service on February 28, 2021, as Chief of the Electrical Engineering Division, providing leadership for end-to-end electrical engineering capabilities to enable NASA science observations from space.

Tony started his career at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 1986 as a high school intern. He served as an electronics technician while a co-op student supporting several branches in Robotics, Power Systems, and Flight Data Processing Devices. Tony spent much of his career working as a design and test engineer specializing in parts and radiation qualification of microelectronics in support of spaceflight missions such as Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) Instrument on Mars Curiosity Rover, and Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission.

Tony transitioned into management in 2008 as Associate Branch Head of the Flight Data Systems and Radiation Effects Branch. In 2011, he served as Assistant Chief and in 2013, as Associate Chief in the Electrical Engineering Division.

In 2015, Tony served as Associate Chief of the Quality and Reliability Division in the Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) Directorate where he established Goddard’s first Quality Engineering Branch and implemented new commodity risk assessment engineers to meet the Goddard Center Director’s reorganization goals and initiatives for SMA.

In 2016, Tony served as Associate Chief of the Instruments Systems and Technology Division. He led the Detector Development Laboratory modernization plan to maintain core capabilities that enable NASA to continue to do science missions.

In 2018, Tony worked at NASA Headquarters in the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance where he was matrixed to the Science Mission Directorate, providing technical authority to over 100 science missions as well as served as senior advisor to the NASA Electronic Parts Manager for the Agency.

Tony holds a B.S. in Electrical and Nuclear Engineering from University of Maryland, College Park and a Certificate in Public Leadership from the Brookings Institute, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of the NASA Honor Award for Group Achievement for Detector Development Improvement for NASA 2018, the Robert H. Goddard (RHG) Award for Mentoring in 2016, RHG Award for Supervisory in 2015, and the Agency NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Medal in 2015. He is a member of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and lifetime member of the National Society of Black Engineers.