Lisa Akers

As Chief Engineer for NASA’s Orion human spaceflight program at Lockheed Martin—including the Artemis II mission designed to carry humans around the Moon—Lisa has spent nearly two decades at the intersection of technical excellence and human complexity. A Silver Snoopy Award winner, she is one of aerospace’s most trusted voices on what it actually takes to lead people who do dangerous, consequential work.

Her path was anything but linear. She majored in English before finding her way to aerospace, served in the Air Force in space operations, led cross-functional launch teams, stepped away for five years to raise her children, and returned to the space world with a sharper eye for the patterns that make or break technical organizations. That combination of literary training, military discipline, and decades of high-stakes leadership shaped the Emotional Architect framework—a systematic methodology for building the human systems that determine whether technical systems succeed or fail.

Lisa founded the Human Variable Institute to formalize what she learned the hard way: that emotional labor is a systems problem, not a personality problem; that “difficult” people are usually the product of dysfunctional environments; and that sustainable technical excellence requires leaders who can read human context as fluently as they read data.

She is a sought-after speaker, mentor to emerging technical leaders across the aerospace industry, and a passionate advocate for normalizing the specific challenges that high-performing women face—at work, in relationships, and in the quiet space between ambition and exhaustion. She is the mother of two remarkable young men who have taught her more about leadership than any program ever could.

More About Lisa
— Lisa’s Website
— Our Interview with Lisa
— NASA Engineer Brings Moon Mission to Classroom
— Bluefield Graduate Works on NASA’s Historic Artemis Program
— Artemis Chief Engineer for Artemis II Moon Mission Reveals Secret to Technical Success: It’s Not the Math, It’s the Humans