Karen Petraska

Karen Petraska is presently serving as the Service Executive for Computing Services in the NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer, leading NASA’s response to the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative and exploring larger overall agency computing issues including cloud computing. Karen has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and 25 years of experience between academia, industry and government. She has worked in several areas of enterprise IT infrastructure services including messaging, directories, authentication/authorization, networks, data centers and IT security and has a significant interest in the challenges of technology and policy integration in large organizations. Karen most recently served as the NASA Service Executive for Authentication and Authentication where she led NASA’s HSPD-12 implementation and delivered several key capabilities to ensure NASA’s compliance. Previously she served as the Chief Information Officer at NASA’s Ames Research Center and before that, as the Chief of the Information Services and Technology Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.