In July 2020, Pete was selected as the Chief of the Instrument Systems & Technology Division (ISTD) in the Engineering & Technology Directorate (ETD) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Prior to this, he served as the Associate Chief of ISTD from April 2006 and Head of the Optics Branch from December 1997 at GSFC. Pete has over 38 years of experience at NASA/GSFC providing specialized engineering expertise and leadership to develop state-of-the-art Earth and space science instrument hardware and innovative technologies in the areas of optics, lasers and electro-optics, detector systems, microwave instruments, and cryogenics and fluids to enable scientific discovery and exploration.

Pete started at GSFC in 1985 as an optical systems design engineer in the Optics Branch. As a highly recognized optics subject matter expert (SME), he served as a member of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Standing Review Board and Goddard Standing Review Team. Pete was the lead optical systems designer for the very successful Cassini Composite InfraRed Spectrometer (CIRS) and the Spitzer Telescope InfraRed Array Camera (IRAC) instruments and was part of the team that successfully designed and developed the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) instrument. Previous to working at NASA, Pete worked for 4 years as an optical metrology engineer at Perkin-Elmer(P-E) where he developed and implemented phase-measuring interferometers for testing high precision optics in support of P-E’s commercial microlithography instrumentation product line.

Pete co-founded the ETD Diversity and Inclusion Committee (D&IC) in 2009 serving as its deputy chair and then served as its chair in 2012-2014. He received the 2012 Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement Award for Diversity and Equal Employment Opportunity.

Pete received his M.S. degree in Physics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1986 and his B.S. degree in Applied Physics (with a concentration in optics) from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1979. In recognition of his very successful career at GSFC, Pete received the 2017 Robert H. Goddard Award of Merit.