Lauren
Smith
Operations Manager - New Moon Operating Unit at Northrop Grumman Corporation
"Navigating Leadership Success Early in the Journey: A Fireside Chat with Lauren Smith"
"Navigating Leadership Success Early in the Journey: A Fireside Chat with Lauren Smith"
June 10th - 10:40 AM EDT/New York (See in local time)
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05//2026 10:40 AM
05//2026 11:00 AM
America/New_York
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"Navigating Leadership Success Early in the Journey: A Fireside Chat with Lauren Smith"
#WTGC2026
"Navigating Leadership Success Early in the Journey: A Fireside Chat with Lauren Smith"
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"Navigating Leadership Success Early in the Journey: A Fireside Chat with Lauren Smith"
"Navigating Leadership Success Early in the Journey: A Fireside Chat with Lauren Smith"
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Session: Navigating Leadership Success Early in the Journey: A Fireside Chat with Lauren Smith
In this fireside chat, Lauren will engage in a dialogue about her path to leadership early in her career journey.Bio
Lauren Smith is the Operations Manager for Northrop Grumman’s New Moon Enterprise Operating Unit. In this role, she plays a key role in all aspects of program execution and strategic planning. She is also currently the Chair of the company’s first-ever Systems and Software Engineering Symposium. Preceding this role, Lauren was a Program Manager in Resiliency and Rapid Prototyping working strategic space captures. She was also the Mechanical Test Engineering Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program and was previously a member of the JWST Integration & Test (I&T) Senior Staff as the I&T lead for Nonexplosive Actuators (NEAs) and Deployments.Prior to JWST, Lauren held multiple diverse roles at Northrop Grumman in air and in space. As a program manager in NG Next, she led rapid design and strategy development for new space systems and small satellites. Lauren was also the program manager of Quad Cup, the 2016 Sector Innovation Challenge. Under her leadership, Quad Cup brought together employees across the country to compete in a quadcopter sporting event demonstrating critical technologies such as GPS-denied navigation and collision avoidance.
Before joining Northrop Grumman, Lauren worked at NASA Glenn Research Center in the Simulated Lunar Operations (SLOPE) Lab. She also conducted her thesis work at Glenn, specializing in mechanisms and robotics. This work contributed to being named one of Aviation Week’s Twenty20s. Lauren graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, bachelor’s degrees in aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering, and a minor in political science.
Lauren has held numerous leadership roles on the Executive Committee of the Space Generation Advisory Council – an international non-profit that represents young space professionals to the United Nations. She co-founded Caroline’s Project, a nonprofit that sends girls to STEM summer camps, and was recently recognized as a 2019 Future Space Leader Grant winner. Lauren has provided industry thought leadership through participation in over 40 panels, keynotes, and interviews in domestic and international forums. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Space Foundation.
Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products and solutions in autonomous systems, cyber, C4ISR, space, strike and logistics and modernization to customers worldwide. Please visit news.northropgrumman.com and follow us on Twitter, @NGCNews, for more information.