Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984
• 1983 First Team Academic All-America® Softball
• 1984 First Team Academic All-America® Softball
• 1984 First Team Academic All-America® Women's At-Large (Field Hockey)
• 1984 First Team Academic All-America® Women's Basketball
Louise Jandura was inducted into the CoSIDA Academic All-America® Hall of Fame on June 10, 2019 during the CoSIDA Convention at the Orlando World Center Marriott.
Recognized with numerous accolades and honors throughout her career with NASA, Jandura is an engineering leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the Mars 2020 mission
. She serves as the Sampling and Caching Subsystem Chief Engineer for the Mars venture. Jandura joined JPL, located in Pasadena, California, following graduate school, and has spent her entire professional career - nearly 30 years - working at JPL to deliver mechanisms, robotics and scientific hardware to many space flight projects including the Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, and the Genesis and Aquarius missions.
Currently, she leads a team of 120 engineers who are designing and building the sampling and caching system for the Mars 2020 rover. The goal is for this sampling system to acquire scientific samples of soil and rock from Mars, package those samples, and leave them on the surface of Mars for a future mission for retrieval and transport back to Earth.
A 1984 graduate of MIT with an undergraduate degree in Course 2 (mechanical engineering) and a 4.7 grade point average (on MIT's 5.0 scale), Jandura was a three-sport scholar-athlete as a member of the varsity field hockey, basketball, and softball teams. She is MIT's only four-time Academic All-America honoree, earning First Team All-America honors twice in softball (1983, 1984) as a junior and senior and adding to her senior year accolades by claiming 1984 Second Team All-America honors on the basketball and at-large (for field hockey) AAA teams.
She was team MVP and captain of the field hockey and softball teams, and led the MIT softball squad to the Massachusetts AIAW championship as a sophomore and to the Eastern AIAW Division III Tournament as a junior. In 1983, she was selected to compete in the 1983 U.S. Hockey Festival and the New England Field Hockey Coaches Association Tournament.
Among her numerous MIT academic accolades, Jandura was inducted in both Tau Beta Pi and Pi Tau Sigma, the engineering and mechanical engineering honor societies, respectively. In 1984 as a senior, Jandura won the Malcom G. Kispert Award as the MIT Scholar-Athlete of the Year and was a MIT Alumnae Senior Academic Award Honorable Mention recipient.
Following her 1984 graduation, Jandura stayed at MIT to receive her masters in mechanical engineering in 1986. Along with two graduate classmates, she was granted a patent in 1995 for design work on an Automatic Dispenser for Dry Ingredients, for work they accomplished during their postgraduate years.
Since 2010, she has served as a member of the Organizing Committee for the Aerospace Mechanisms Symposium and was co-host chair of the 41st Aerospace Mechanisms Symposium in May 2012.
The highly-honored Jandura won the 2013 Individual NASA Honor Award Medal for Exceptional Engineering Achievement for her work on the sampling system for Mars Curiosity rover, earned the 2015 JPL People Leadership Award, and received the 2003 Individual NASA Honor Award for Exceptional Achievement for her work on the Genesis Payload Mechanisms. She also has been part of 11 NASA Group Achievement Awards for her work on her numerous space missions projects and scientific developments.
Jandura does classroom outreach as a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, educating young children about the Mars missions and the space program. She also has served as a robotics mentor at The Archer School for Girls, volunteers to serve the homeless in Pasadena (Calif.) and works with USA Field Hockey as an Umpire Manager training other umpires.
