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NASA Names Acting Associate Administrator, More Leadership Changes

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WASHINGTON, Feb. 24, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — NASA acting Administrator Janet Petro announced Monday Vanessa Wyche will serve as the acting associate administrator for the agency at NASA Headquarters in Washington, effective immediately. Wyche, who had been the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is detailed as Petro’s senior advisor leading the agency’s center directors and mission directorate associate administrators. She will act as the agency’s chief operating officer for about 18,000 civil servant employees and an annual budget of more than $25 billion. Stephen Koerner will become the acting center director of NASA Johnson.

The agency also named Jackie Jester as associate administrator for the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs and announced Catherine Koerner, associate administrator for the agency’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, will retire effective Friday, Feb. 28. Lori Glaze, currently the deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development, will become the mission directorate’s acting associate administrator.

“As we continue to advance our mission, it’s crucial that we have strong, experienced leaders in place,” Petro said. “Vanessa will bring exceptional leadership to NASA’s senior ranks, helping guide our workforce toward the opportunities that lie ahead, while Steve will continue to provide steadfast leadership at NASA Johnson. Jackie’s return to the agency will ensure we remain closely aligned with national priorities as we work with Congress. Cathy’s legacy is one of unwavering dedication to human spaceflight, and we are grateful for her years of service. Lori’s leadership will continue to build on that legacy as we push forward in our exploration efforts. These appointments reflect NASA’s unwavering commitment to excellence, and I have full confidence that each of these leaders will carry our vision forward with purpose, integrity, and a relentless drive to succeed.”

Prior to her new role, Wyche was the director NASA Johnson – home to America’s astronaut corps, Mission Control Center, International Space Station, Orion and Gateway Programs, and its more than 11,000 civil service and contractor employees. Her responsibilities included a broad range of human spaceflight activities, including development and operation of human spacecraft, NASA astronaut selection and training, mission control, commercialization of low Earth orbit, and leading NASA Johnson in exploring the Moon and Mars.

During her 35-year career, Wyche has served in several leadership roles, including Johnson’s deputy center director, director of Exploration Integration and Science Directorate, flight manager of several Space Shuttle Program missions, and executive officer in the Office of the Administrator. A native of South Carolina, Wyche earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Master of Science in Bioengineering from Clemson University. 

As deputy director of NASA Johnson, Stephen Koerner, oversaw strategic workforce planning, serves as the Designated Agency Safety Health Officer, and supported the Johnson center director in mission reviews. Before his appointment in July 2021, Koerner held various leadership roles at NASA Johnson, including director of the Flight Operations Directorate, associate director, chief financial officer, deputy director of flight operations, and deputy director of mission operations.

In her new role as the associate administrator for the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs, Jester will direct a staff responsible for managing and coordinating all communication with the U.S. Congress, as well as serve as a senior advisor to agency leaders on legislative matters. 

Jester rejoins the agency after serving as the senior director for government affairs at Relativity Space’s Washington office where she led policy engagement for the company. Prior to her time with Relativity, she served as a policy advisor at NASA and at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She has served as a professional staff member for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. She has spent time in state government as the Chief Legislative Aide to a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Jester has significant experience advising on space policy issues, aviation operations and safety policy, and has helped develop numerous pieces of legislation.

With a 34-year career at NASA, Catherine Koerner has been instrumental in leading NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, overseeing the development of the agency’s deep space exploration approach. Previously, she was the deputy associate administrator for the mission directorate. Her extensive career at NASA includes roles such as the Orion program manager, director of the Human Health and Performance Directorate, former NASA flight director, several leadership positions within the International Space Station Program during its assembly phase and helping to foster a commercial space industry in low Earth orbit.

Glaze has a distinguished background in planetary science, previously serving as the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division before joining Explorations Systems Development. Prior to her tenure at NASA Headquarters in Washington, she was the chief of the Planetary Geology, Geophysics and Geochemistry Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the Deputy Director of Goddard’s Solar System Exploration Division. She has been a leading advocate for Venus exploration, serving as the principal investigator for the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging mission. Glaze earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees in Physics from the University of Texas at Arlington and a doctorate in Environmental Science from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. Her prior experience includes roles at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Proxemy Research as Vice President and Senior Research Scientist.

For more about NASA’s missions, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

 

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SOURCE NASA

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MARIANA MINERALS RESTARTS UTAH COPPER MINE AS THE WORLD’S ONLY AUTONOMOUS-FIRST MINE AND REFINERY

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April 27, 2026

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Software-first minerals company integrates autonomous haulage, drilling, and robotic sensing across mining and refining under a single AI operating platform

SAN JUAN COUNTY, Utah, April 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Mariana Minerals, the world’s only software-first, vertically integrated minerals company, today announced the restart of mining operations at Copper One in southeastern Utah. The restart marks a milestone in mining history: Copper One becomes the world’s first mine to deploy autonomous tools across all three operational domains (mining, refining, and capital project execution) unified under a single operating system.

Mariana acquired Lisbon Valley Mining Company in Q4 2025, gaining control of a roughly 10,000-acre permitted land package that has produced high-purity copper cathode since 2009. While refinery operations continued uninterrupted, mining was paused in late 2024. Mining operations resume this month with autonomous systems and autonomous orchestration active from day one.

“Copper One will be the first mine where delivering end-to-end autonomy is the priority, where it’s being rapidly deployed across mining and refining operations and coordinated by our internal software stack. That’s what MarianaOS makes possible. We chose to prove it here because the stakes are real: the U.S. has a structural copper deficit, and the window to close it is narrowing. We’re producing now and ramping output aggressively, with the primary goal of achieving fully-autonomous mining operations,” said Turner Caldwell, Co-Founder & CEO, Mariana Minerals.

MarianaOS: An Autonomy-First Mining Operating System
What makes Copper One unprecedented is not any single piece of autonomous equipment, but the intelligence layer coordinating them. MarianaOS integrates three core subsystems, MineOS, PlantOS, and CapitalProjectOS, into a unified platform spanning project execution through copper production.

On the mining side, Copper One will begin with integrating three best-in-class autonomous equipment platforms. Pronto’s turnkey Autonomous Haulage System (AHS) uses camera-based machine learning and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to enable fully driverless haul truck operation, with OEM-agnostic retrofit capability across mixed fleets. Sandvik’s AutoMine® platform enables autonomous production drilling, allowing operators to simultaneously monitor multiple surface machine operations from a remote-operations control center. And Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadruped robots autonomously patrol the open pit, heap leach pad, and solvent extraction-electrowinning (SX-EW) refinery infrastructure. All of these data feed directly into MineOS, enabling fleet-wide optimization and continuous improvement.

PlantOS extends autonomous operations into refining by integrating real-time sensor data across the entire refining process (solution chemistry, flow rates, temperature, and electrowinning cell performance) into a unified control system. Machine learning models predict process drift, automatically adjust reagent dosing, and flags maintenance needs before they impact output. The result is a continuously optimized refinery that operates with minimal human intervention.

CapitalProjectOS redefines how capital-intensive infrastructure projects are planned and executed. Traditional projects often take a decade or more and frequently suffer from chronic cost overruns. CapitalProjectOS integrates process development, engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning data into a single platform that enables real-time progress tracking, predictive risk modeling, and automated schedule optimization. At Copper One, CapitalProjectOS is managing the expansion roadmap to scale output to 50,000 metric tons per year, coordinating heap leach pad expansions, refinery upgrades, and autonomous equipment deployment in parallel.

Built to Move Fast
While Mariana is actively constructing and developing greenfield projects – with the goal of compressing engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning timelines leveraging CapitalProjectOS – Copper One is uniquely positioned to accelerate deployment of MarianaOS at scale. With an existing open pit mine, heap leach pad, and SX-EW refining infrastructure already in place, Mariana will rapidly ramp production that would take years to replicate elsewhere.

Mariana’s longer-term plan is to scale Copper One output to 50,000 metric tons per year of high-purity copper cathode by 2030, leveraging additional proven deposits on the property and integrating copper scrap recycling.

A Critical Supply Gap
The U.S. currently imports approximately 50% of its refined copper. With domestic demand projected to nearly double by 2035 — driven by AI data centers, defense systems, EVs, and grid modernization — the supply gap is a national security issue. The Trump Administration’s Section 232 investigation cited copper imports as a direct concern, and the Pentagon has identified critical minerals vulnerability as a threat to the defense industrial base.

Domestic operations like Copper One, and the step-change in productivity that autonomous operations deliver, have become strategically essential.

About Mariana Minerals
Mariana engineers, builds, and operates mines and refineries, using proprietary AI and machine learning tools to accelerate project execution and optimize production across critically needed metals. Copper One is Mariana’s second active project, alongside Lithium One, the world’s first GWh-scale lithium extraction facility from oil and gas produced water, currently under construction in East Texas. Mariana has raised $120 million in total capital, including a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and strategic investors.

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SOURCE Mariana Minerals

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State CISOs Report Lower Confidence Across the Public Sector Cyber Ecosystem, 2026 NASCIO-Deloitte Survey Finds

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April 27, 2026

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The 2026 National Association of Chief Information Officers – Deloitte biennial cybersecurity study finds state officials face increasingly sophisticated threats, including new artificial intelligence-enabled tactics, and highlights steps CISOs are taking to better protect public data and critical digital services

NEW YORK, April 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — 

Key takeaways

The survey of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) from all 50 states and two territories found that just 26% of state CISOs are “extremely” or “very” confident that their state’s information assets are protected from cyber threats, down from 48% in 2022.Implementing effectiveness metrics is now CISOs’ top priority: 49% named it a top cybersecurity initiative in 2026, up from 15% in 2022.Nearly all state CISOs (94%) said they are involved in developing Generative AI security policies and 84% are involved in Generative AI strategy development.Budget pressure is rising with 16% of CISOs reporting their budgets have been cut, up from none in 2024.The percentage of CISOs who described themselves as “not very confident” in the ability of local government and public higher education to secure public data rose significantly, from 35% in 2022 to 63% in 2026.

Why this decline in confidence matters
States share data and systems with counties, cities, and public colleges and universities, so a vulnerability in one network can cascade, exposing personal information, disrupting essential services and driving costly incident response. As attackers adopt AI-enabled tactics, the urgency is growing for faster coordination, clearer policy and stronger baseline defenses across the public sector. This may explain why roughly one-fifth of CISOs indicated that their states were moving toward a “whole-of-state” approach to cybersecurity.

Metrics reporting becomes CISOs’ top priority
Top priorities for CISOs have shifted since the 2024 survey. When asked to identify their states’ top cybersecurity initiatives for 2026, half of CISOs named implementing effectiveness metrics (49%, up from 25% in 2024 and 15% in 2022). Capturing the effectiveness of cyber spending can be difficult, but without metrics, it is challenging to show the benefits of investments. Tracking operational, compliance and risk-based key performance indicators, such as incident response time and phishing click rate, can help demonstrate the return on cyber investment.

AI both accelerates threats and becomes a frontline defense
AI is accelerating the scale and sophistication of attacks targeting public sector systems, making it easier and cheaper for adversaries to generate and automate cyberattacks. CISOs also point to an emerging threat toolkit, including deepfakes that can fool people and evade detection, AI agents that probe for weaknesses and adapt, and AI-driven ransomware-as-a-service operations.

At the same time, CISOs describe AI as a practical way to keep pace, using it to triage security alerts, summarize events, and explore faster report creation, threat identification and training. Several states are already utilizing Generative AI in core security operations, including security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR). The report also underscores how central CISOs have become to state AI efforts.

Key quotes
“We’re seeing more states move toward a ‘whole-of-state’ cybersecurity approach where the state helps extend protection beyond state agencies to local governments, public education and other critical entities that can become an entry point for attackers. At its core, it’s about scaling capabilities through shared services and better collaboration so a weakness in one part of the ecosystem doesn’t become a statewide incident. Many states are looking to scale capabilities through security operations centers and regional support, so counties, cities and schools can benefit from the same cyber-defense muscle as the enterprise.”

Mike Wyatt, Stale local and higher education cyber risk leader, Deloitte

“It’s an encouraging development that state CISOs are being placed at the center of Generative AI security. They are helping shape the strategy, establishing security policies and reviewing proposed use cases. By being involved from the beginning, CISOs are helping governments move faster without sacrificing safeguards because security and governance complement each other. We’re also seeing CISOs explore practical uses of AI to strengthen day-to-day defense, while putting clearer guardrails around responsible uses.”

Meredith Ward, deputy executive director, NASCIO

Additional data
To read the 2026 NASCIO-Deloitte report in its entirety, click here.

About NASCIO
The National Association of State Chief Information Officers is the premier network and resource for state CIOs and a leading advocate for technology policy at all levels of government. NASCIO represents state chief information officers and information technology executives from the states, territories, and the District of Columbia. For more information about NASCIO visit www.nascio.org.

As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte & Touche LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

 

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SOURCE Deloitte

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Duck Creek Kicks Off Formation ’26 as Strong Fiscal Momentum Signals Accelerating Demand for its Intelligent Core Insurance Platform

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April 27, 2026

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Company highlights double-digit SaaS growth, global expansion, and launch of its new agentic AI platform as industry leaders gather in Orlando

BOSTON, April 27, 2026 /CNW/ — Duck Creek Technologies, the intelligent core of insurance, today kicks off Formation ’26: Agents of Innovation, its flagship user conference, as the company builds strong momentum in the first half of fiscal 2026, marked by double-digit year-over-year SaaS ARR growth fueled by new logos and expansion across its global customer base.

Duck Creek’s strong start to fiscal 2026 reflects this demand, with double-digit new customer wins and existing customer expansions across its core, specialty, and AI-powered solutions. Adoption of Duck Creek’s intelligent cloud continues to scale globally. Insurers are selecting Duck Creek for its enterprise depth including policy, billing, claims, rating, loss control, reinsurance, distribution management, and payments solutions to operate faster, more accurately, and maintain regulatory compliance.

“We are expanding our leadership in insurance technology with more than 370 customers globally. Including 33 of the top 50 North American insurers,” said Hardeep Gulati, Chief Executive Officer of Duck Creek. “Insurers modernizing their core systems are looking for more from their technology. They need a trusted partner like Duck Creek with proven enterprise scale and speed-to-value to help them drive profitable impact and growth. At Formation, we are excited to announce our new agentic platform that will help further improve the combined ratios for insurers with more than $150B in premium flowing through Duck Creek annually.”

Formation ’26 will bring together more than 800 insurance professionals, ecosystem partners, and industry leaders to explore how technology is transforming the insurance lifecycle. The event underscores growing market demand for intelligent, cloud-native platforms that enable insurers to accelerate cloud migration, product development, and automate core insurance workflows to accelerate decision-making and improve operational agility. A highlight of the event will be Duck Creek unveiling its agentic AI platform and showcasing live demonstrations of agentic applications and agents.

Formation ’26 will feature a distinguished lineup of guest speakers joining Gulati during his keynote, including Stephen Lord, Global CIO of AXIS Capital, and Monti Saroya, Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of the Flagship Fund at Vista Equity Partners. Together, they will share perspectives on large-scale transformation, AI adoption, and the future of agentic insurance.

The conference will also include a customer panel moderated by Chief Operating Officer Chris McCloskey, featuring leaders from Core Specialty, Europ Assistance, and Arbella Insurance, who will discuss their transformation journeys and business outcomes achieved through modern core systems. An analyst panel moderated by SVP of Sales William Magowan will bring together experts from AM Best, Celent, and Datos Insights to provide an external view on market trends and innovation benchmarks.

Customer Momentum

Millers Mutual Insurance advanced its modernization strategy with Duck Creek OnDemand, implementing Policy, Billing, and Reinsurance Clarity to modernize its core systems and support continued growth in the multifamily housing insurance market.Anchor Group Management Inc. partnered with Duck Creek to modernize its insurance payments infrastructure, enabling more streamlined billing processes and improved digital payment experiences for policyholders.Frankenmuth Insurance adopted Duck Creek OnDemand Distribution Management to transform how it manages agencies and producers, increasing visibility, improving operational efficiency, and strengthening collaboration across its distribution network.Indigo Insurance turned to Duck Creek OnDemand to accelerate its modernization strategy and support rapid growth, gaining a scalable cloud-based core platform designed to bring new products to market faster.Encova Insurance went live on an upgraded Duck Creek OnDemand Distribution Management system, unifying agency operations across lines of business, streamlining onboarding, and improving the overall agent experience.New Zealand’s Medical Assurance Society (MAS) selected Duck Creek’s full suite of core solutions delivered via OnDemand to modernize its general insurance business, enhance member experiences, and support a broader digital and data-driven transformation.Country-Wide Insurance selected Duck Creek Clarity to strengthen its data and analytics capabilities, enabling real-time insights and preparing for its upcoming OnDemand go-live with Active Delivery.Fortegra selected Duck Creek Reinsurance and Duck Creek Clarity to modernize financial operations, improve portfolio transparency, and support continued growth across products, geographies, and distribution models.Duck Creek secured more than a dozen additional new customer engagements across commercial specialty and personal lines.

Industry Recognition

Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SaaS P&C Insurance Core Platforms North America, marking the seventh consecutive year the company has been recognized as a Leader.Named a Leader in the Everest Group 2025 Underwriting Orchestration Products PEAK Matrix Assessment, recognizing Duck Creek’s strength in delivering AI-driven underwriting, integrated core workflows, and measurable value across global P&C carriers.Featured in Everest Group’s 2026 Voice of the Customer Report for Insurance CXOPs, outperforming both core system peers and the market average, with customers citing strengths in seamless implementation, deep core system integration, and enterprise scalability and more.Received the 2025 IDC FinTech Real Results Award for Insurance Transformation for measurable customer outcomes.

About Duck Creek

Duck Creek is the intelligent core that leading insurers choose to build on. Purpose-built for property and casualty (P&C) and general insurance, Duck Creek unifies the full insurance lifecycle on a single platform with one data foundation. As an agentic platform, it connects intelligence across underwriting, policy, billing, claims, and payments workflows where decisions are made and compliance is non-negotiable. Duck Creek enables carriers to launch products faster, adapt quickly to change, and grow with precision and confidence. Solutions are available individually or as a full suite via Duck Creek OnDemand. Visit www.duckcreek.com and follow Duck Creek on LinkedIn and X.

Media Contacts:  
Marianne Dempsey / Tara Stred  
duckcreek@threeringsinc.com

 

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SOURCE Duck Creek Technologies, Inc.

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