Christine Moran

VP of Engineering

Horizonai

May 2025 - Jul 2026 (1 year 3 months)

Director

Horizonai

Aug 2024 - May 2025 (10 months)

Senior Engineering Manager, Applied Machine Learning

Planet

Oct 2023 - Aug 2024 (11 months)

Senior Engineering Manager, Pelican Data Pipeline

Planet

Aug 2022 - Nov 2023 (1 year 4 months)

Deputy Manager for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Apr 2021 - Aug 2022 (1 year 5 months)

In this role I co-managed the Exoplanet Exploration Program, which is a NASA Headquarters Program that JPL manages for the NASA Astrophysics Division and the exoplanet science community. The mission of the Exoplanet Exploration Program is threefold – to search for planets beyond our solar system, characterize them, and look for life among the stars. The scientists and engineers who work at NASA's exoplanet program work daily to make those goals a reality.

Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, Mars Perseverance Rover Engineering Cameras Operations

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Feb 2021 - Sep 2021 (8 months)

In the downlink role I reported my analysis on the downlink of data and photographs from the Mars Perseverance Rover's Engineering Cameras. This downlink and analysis is critical for rover operations. In the uplink role I was responsible for commanding the rover's Engineering Cameras. For this work I received the 2021 Mars Time Instrument Operations Team Award for significant contribution to Mars Time tactical operations shifts supporting ECAM, PIXL, SHERLOC/WATSON, IDSO and IO Systems.

Technical Group Supervisor, Cyber Defense Engineering and Research

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Jul 2019 - Apr 2021 (1 year 10 months)

In this role I managed a group of 14 Cyber Defense Engineers and supported cybersecurity in JPL's Flight Projects.

Guest Researcher, Theoretical Astrophysics and Numerical Relativity

Caltech

Jan 2018 - Jan 2020 (2 years 1 month)

Cyber Defense Researcher and Software Engineer

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Jan 2018 - Jul 2019 (1 year 7 months)

Research and software engineering on Europa Clipper and the Cyber Security Improvement Project.

South Pole Telescope Winterover

University of Chicago

Jan 2016 - Nov 2016 (11 months)

Primary responsibility of the maintenance and operation of the South Pole Telescope (SPT) with associated service as an integral part of the SPT collaboration and participation in scientific analysis. Duties require a continuous stay at the South Pole, lasting approximately eleven months from January to November 2016. Fiducial duties include operating, evaluating and improving performance of mechanical systems (including servo systems, cryogenic systems and telescopes), analog and digital electronics, RF instruments, computers systems and data acquisition software.

NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow (NSF AAPF)

Caltech

Jun 2015 - Jan 2018 (2 years 8 months)

Postdoctoral researcher in theoretical astrophysics in the Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity and Cosmology (TAPIR) group at Caltech under an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship (NSF AAPF). Operated the South Pole Telescope at the geographic South Pole in Antarctica on sabbatical January-November 2016.

Postdoctoral Scholar, Numerical Relativity

Caltech

Feb 2015 - May 2015 (4 months)

Postdoctoral researcher in theoretical astrophysics in the Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity and Cosmology (TAPIR) group.

Propulsion Intern

Space Exploration Technologies

Sep 2014 - Dec 2014 (4 months)

Adjunct Professor

Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute University of the Philippines

Jul 2013 - Jun 2014 (1 year)

Teaching programming, mobile development and entrepreneurship in joint undergraduate/graduate computer science course. Mentoring student startups.

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MIT MEET: Middle East Education Through Technology

Meet

Jun 2013 - Jul 2013 (2 months)

Taught mobile development and entrepreneurship in gifted high school program.

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Senior Security Software Engineer

Open WhisperSystems

Mar 2013 - Feb 2015 (2 years)

Co-lead software and security engineer of TextSecure iOS, encrypting text messages end-to-end. Product co-lead of Signal iOS. Signal encrypts phone calls and text messages end-to-end.

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Treasurer of the Board, CTO

Tech Good

Jan 2013 - Jan 2015 (2 years 1 month)

Tech 4 Good is a start-up non-profit dedicated to violence prevention in vulnerable populations through the use of mobile technology and harm-reduction education principles. We are a lean, global team bringing our experience with storytelling, code and design to develop engaging tools and campaigns to support a culture of connectivity and accountability. Our principal project is Circle of 6, an anti-sexual violence mobile application targeting vulnerable communities in the US and in India. Circle of 6 was co-created in 2011 by The Line Campaign, Inc. and ISIS, Inc, two non-profits dedicated to creating healthier communities.

TEDxZurich Organizer

TEDx

Jan 2011 - Oct 2012 (1 year 10 months)

I helped produce the TEDxZurich conference in both 2011 and 2013. In 2011 I was involved with speaker coordination and in 2012 I helped to make the technology and production run smoothly leading up to, day of, and after the event.

Ph.D. Researcher

Institute for Theoretical Physics University of Zurich

Apr 2010 - Sep 2014 (4 years 6 months)

PhD, Theoretical Physics, defended September 2014. Title: Cosmological N-body Simulations as Probes of Gravity. Computational cosmology on the petascale. Research and development in computational astrophysics, high performance computing, and big data visualization. Research interests include galaxy formation, reionization, modified gravity, quantum gravity, numerical relativity, parallel visualization, halo finding and numerical methods. Assisted courses including Mathemetical Methods for Physicists I, II, Astrophysical Dynamics, Advanced Computational Science, Quantum Mechanics I, Continuum Mechanics. Supervised Bachelor's and Master's student theses. Served as PhD student representative for the Institute for Theoretical Physics, and on

Research Scientist

Institute of Astronomy ETH Zurich

Dec 2009 - Apr 2010 (5 months)

Worked to accurately model galaxy surface brightness profiles in the new Wide Field Camera 3 imaging of the GOODS-South and HUDF-South fields. As a component of this work, I examined the variation of these profiles as a function of observed wavelength and developed an empirical characterization of the point spread function of the WFC3.

Master's student

University of Zurich

Aug 2008 - Dec 2009 (1 year 5 months)

Research and development related to parallel analysis and visualization tasks. Developed and released AstroViz, an open-source parallel visualization tool for astrophysical simulations implemented as a plugin extending the application ParaView.

Mobile application development

Independent Contractor

Jan 2008 - Jan 2014 (6 years 1 month)

I have been the lead developer for several award winning mobile applications on iOS, Android and more. My applications have been featured everywhere from USA Today, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Wired, MTV, TechCrunch, the New York Times, to Lifehacker and lauded by luminaries from Melinda Gates to US VP Joe Biden.

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Associate Scientist

BBN Technologies

Aug 2007 - Aug 2008 (1 year 1 month)

Developed the text component of a Speech-to-Speech English-to-Malaysian translation device as part of the TRANSTAC project. Researched, developed, and deployed English-to-Arabic Speech-to-Speech translation systems.

Lecturer

MIT MEET Middle East Education Through Technology

Jun 2007 - Aug 2007 (3 months)

Taught Java programming and entrepreneurship to high school students in the Middle East.

Research Assistant

MIT MEET Middle East Education Through Technology

Jan 2006 - Jun 2007 (1 year 6 months)

Researched machine translation and transliteration technology developing statistical method to transliterate Arabic named entities to English.

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Research Scientist

Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing

Jan 2006

Research, developed, and implemented statistical machine translation methods. Work released as component of open source machine translation toolkit, Moses

Teaching Assistant

MIT

Jan 2005

Led problem solving and exam review sessions for freshman level Electricity and Magnetism course. Graded homework assignments meeting weekly with staff.

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Software Engineer

FAST Search and Transfer

Jan 2005

Developed method of translating queries in Fast Search’s native query language to other query languages. Enabled efficient and accurate comparisons of search results from different search engines.

Software Engineer

Lucent Technologies

Jan 2004

Developed software applications to integrate printed circuit board and metals castings design recommendations into end-product cost estimation. Automated printed circuit board cost estimation process.

Undergraduate Research

MIT Media Lab

Jan 2003 - Jan 2004 (1 year 1 month)

Wrote C code and ported existing MATLAB code necessary for communication between MSP430 microcontrollers.

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Operator

Photonic Integration Research

Jan 2000 - Jan 2001 (1 year 1 month)

Operator for fiber optic measurement system, measuring of optical Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) circuits (insertion loss, crosstalk and other pass-fail criteria).

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