Shawn M. Kern

Shawn M. Kern is the director for Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Appointed in June 2024, he is responsible for the management and technical direction of the center’s safety and mission assurance programs.

Experience

Previously, Kern was an aerospace technology research pilot and NASA Armstrong’s aviation safety officer since September 2021. He managed all aspects of the center’s aviation safety program and provided independent safety assessment, airworthiness review, and aviation safety oversight. Additionally, he qualified as an instructor and test pilot for the F/A-18 and F-16 aircraft, and as a research pilot for the Gulfstream III aerodynamics research test bed. Kern executed the first flight and completed envelope expansion testing for the NASA Airborne Imaging System project in 2024 and flew all 13 missions of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment in 2022.

From 2019 to 2021, Kern also trained student test pilots and flight test engineers as a flight instructor for the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School in Edwards, California. He was one of three civilian test pilots dual qualified as an instructor for both the F-16 and T-38 aircraft.

Prior to coming to NASA, Kern served in the U.S. Navy as a commander, pilot, and test pilot from 1996 through 2015. His assignments included serving as the director of test and evaluation for the F-35 naval variants from 2014 to 2015 and commanding officer of the Strike Fighter Squadron 115 from 2012 to 2014. He also performed three tours in Japan from 2000 to 2003, 2006 to 2009, and 2012 to 2014. He has more than 3,750 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft types, including 62 combat hours and 763 aircraft carrier landings. Following his Naval career, Kern worked as a business development manager for SRI International (formerly, Stanford Research Institute), which conducted research and product innovation in artificial intelligence, advanced networking, and simulation solutions.

Kern received several honors and awards, including Society of Experimental Test Pilots Associate Fellow in 2023 and a NASA Armstrong Peer Award for Pilot/Engineer/Scientist in 2022. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society and co-authored three technical papers, including “F-35 Embedded Training” published in 2009.

Education

Kern earned a Bachelor of Arts in theoretical/computational linguistics in 1991 from the University of California, San Diego and a Master of Engineering in systems engineering in 2011 from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is working toward a Master of Science in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.