Heather A. Maliska

Heather A. Maliska is the project manager for the X-57 Maxwell, the agency’s first all-electric experimental aircraft, at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. She was previously the Innovation in Commercial Supersonic Aircraft project manager, supporting the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project.

Experience

Maliska transitioned from engineering to project management in 2012 when she was appointed project manager of the X-48C Blended Wing Body project. At the conclusion of the X-48C project, she became the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System (UAS-NAS) Integrated Test and Evaluation subproject manager. In that role, Maliska was awarded the NASA Honor Award for Outstanding Leadership.

In 2006, Maliska became the lead systems integration engineer for the Orion Abort Flight Test project. Following her work on Orion, she was the airframe technology project engineer on the Environmentally Responsible Aviation project, managing and ensuring technical excellence of the airframe technology subproject.

Maliska came to NASA Armstrong as an intern. Then in 1999, she was hired as an aerospace engineer in Armstrong’s Aerostructures Branch, contributing to several projects, including the X-38 astronaut crew return vehicle, F-15B Aerostructures Test Wing and the F/A-18 Active Aeroelastic Wing. In 2002, she became the lead structures engineer on the F-15 Intelligent Flight Control System project.

Education

Maliska earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering in 1999 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.