Deborah F. Woods

Dr. Deborah F. Woods is a senior staff member in the Applied Space Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. She is an active member of the Civil Space Systems and Technology Office where she serves as co-lead of the science team. Woods works at the interface of science and engineering, where she endeavors to connect science mission applications with emerging technical capabilities. Her areas of expertise include survey design, advanced detector development, image processing, and optical system performance modeling.

Woods is an active member of the solar system science community. She serves on the Standing Review Board for the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, providing subject matter expertise in Science Data Applications. She was appointed to NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee (PAC) in 2024. The PAC is called on to “provide advice and make recommendations to the Director, Planetary Science Division, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters on planetary science programs, policies, plans, and priorities.” She presents regularly at conferences and has been an invited speaker at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she presented to the committee on near-Earth object observations in the infrared and visible wavelengths.

Woods joined Lincoln Laboratory as a member of the technical staff in 2009. In that role, she worked on detector characterization and system performance evaluation for the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) instrument. She studied the effects of deep depletion charge-coupled devices on the TESS instrument point spread function (PSF), providing synthetic PSFs for distribution across the mission for use in software development and target selection. Following her time on the TESS instrument team, Woods led the development of a NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office program for asteroid detection in TESS image data. She led the creation of a transient astronomy software pipeline for the identification and characterization of variable stars in the archival image data from the 3.5 meter Space Surveillance Telescope, and developed an application of AI for improving the resolution of binary star systems.

Her education includes an AB in astrophysics from Princeton and an MS and PhD in astronomy from Harvard. Woods has over 20 publications (9 first author) on a range of topics in astronomy and optical instrumentation. She appreciates the opportunity to work with students, and has mentored students at the undergraduate, masters, and PhD level.