Florence Tan

The chair of the Small Spacecraft Coordination Group at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headquarters, Florence Tan leads in developing the US government agency's vision for small spacecraft used for scientific mission and exploration. She also serves as the deputy chief technologist at the NASA Science Mission Directorate, which assesses its technology needs.

Born and raised in Johor, Tan began her career at NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), where she was an electrical engineer for 32 years. During that time, she was involved with building eight mass spectrometers, seven of which were launched to Saturn, Titan (Saturn's moon), Mars, and the Moon. Her work has been recognised with multiple awards such as the NASA Medal for Exceptional Achievement, Goddard Special Act Awards and multiple NASA Group Achievement Awards.

Though Tan’s achievements are abundant, one of the mother-of-two's proudest moments was winning a battle for lactation rooms to be built at GSFC while working there. Due to her advocacy, each new building at GSFC is now built with a lactation room.

She returned to Malaysia in July 2002 to speak at the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium and again in October 2022 for the Khazanah Megatrends Forum.