Mr. Tashakkor is currently serving as a Deputy to the NESC Software Technical Fellow. He joined NASA in 2008 after working on his first masters degree on higher order computational fluid dynamics for acoustics, which was funded through a NASA SBIR and being used at Marshall Space Flight Center. In his career he has focused on flight and ground software development, security, verification, and validation. He started out working computational models for launch vehicles and the associated system components. From there he moved into writing the embedded flight software for Space Launch System (SLS) and other systems. He became the lead of Guidance, Navigation, and Control software for SLS. After winning several awards for this work (including a NASA Early Career achievement award), he switched to working ground system software and operations for several years. He then rejoined flight software and expanded working more with the NESC. Mr. Tashakkor has an undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has two master’s degrees, Aerospace and Computer Engineering. He was born in Decatur, Illinois and resides in Huntsville, Alabama.