Josephine Santiago-Bond

Josephine Santiago-Bond, a Filipina-American systems engineer, is the creator and chief of the Advanced Engineering Development Branch at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She contributed to the 2017 Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatiles Extraction (RESOLVE) project at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), which aimed to map lunar compounds. She also heads the Safety and Mission Assurance department's institutional division at KSC.

Personal life Santiago-Bond was born in the U.S. to Filipino parents. Her parents studied in the U.S. and returned to the Philippines where Santiago-Bond grew up with two older sisters; one of them pursued veterinary medicine and the other pursued human medicine. She said she never felt pressured by her parents to push for similar fields. Santiago-Bond went on to attend college at the University of the Philippines and received a Bachelors of Science in Electronics and Communications. She contributed to the formulation and launch of the Ares I-X in 2009, and she was part of NASA's 2012 Systems Engineering Leadership Development Program (SELDP), where she worked at the Ames Research Center on the LADEE lunar missions. She worked on the 2017 Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatiles Extraction (RESOLVE) project at KSC, which aimed to map water ice and other compounds on the moon.

Santiago-Bond became the chief of the newly formed Advanced Engineering Development Branch that she helped create and that had worked on 70 different projects as of 2019 Santiago-Bond has said that NASA has helped her grow as a leader in her shift from electronic to systems engineering, especially as a woman. The RESOLVE project aims to enact "in situ resource utilization" as a way to reduce or eliminate materials that must be brought up from Earth and placed on the Moon's surface for human use. Chemical/mineral mapping of the Moon's surface can be accomplished using spectrophotometric measurements. NASA's rover will implement the Oxygen Volatile Extraction Node (OVEN) and the Lunar Advanced Volatile Analysis system (LAVA) in order to extract lunar volatile components and allow for evaluation by means of gas chromatography (GC), respectively. Tests were performed at the Kennedy Space Center with Beau Peacock and Janine Captain as well as Evan Niedholdt from JPL and Gottfried. She was also a guest speaker at the book launch of Disrupt 3.0. Filipina Women: Rising on March 28, 2019, which commemorated National Women's Month at the Philippine Embassy in Washington, DC. In October of 2021, the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines partnered with the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) to present two webinars featuring female NASA scientists, of which Santiago-Bond was one. In the first webinar held on October 4, she described the experiences of women scientists, astronauts, and engineers in space.