Kim K. de Groh (BS '85, MS '87, Materials Science) was the 2011 recipient of the Resnik Challenger Medal Award, which was established to honor the Society of Women Engineers' Judith A. Resnik, NASA mission specialist on the Challenger space shuttle flight. It is awarded annually for visionary contributions to space exploration. The award was presented at the Society of Women Engineers annual conference in October 2011.
de Groh is a senior materials research engineer in the space environment and experiments branch at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) in Cleveland, Ohio. She has conducted research and mentored students at GRC for more than 21 years. She is an internationally recognized expert in the environmental durability of spacecraft materials and the principal investigator for many International Space Station flight experiments, developing ground-to-space correlation techniques to improve the accuracy of ground laboratory testing.
She is married to Henry C. de Groh III, also a senior materials research engineer with NASA GRC. They have two teenage boys.
