The United States Space Force has tapped Lt. Col. Gregory Moran to serve as acting director and chief data and artificial intelligence officer (CDAO), a spokesperson for the department told MeriTalk today.
Moran will step into the post following Chandra Donelson’s departure from the role, which she announced last week in a LinkedIn post.
Moran has served in a range of roles across the Defense Department – rebranded as the War Department by the Trump administration.
In May 2024, he was deputy director for enterprise resiliency at the National Reconnaissance Office, where he was responsible for establishing a unified enterprise resilience strategy across seven organizations to strengthen space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities against evolving threats.
Earlier, in July 2017, Moran served as program director for advanced space systems within the Air Force, leading efforts to deliver first-of-their-kind space systems aimed at closing critical national security gaps.
In August 2016, he also served as special programs operations chief at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he led a 112-member acquisition and IT branch and acted as the agency’s focal point for highly classified geospatial intelligence systems and algorithm development.
According to the spokesperson, Donelson will remain within the Department of the Air Force as strategic adviser for human resources IT modernization, analytics, and AI. In that role, she will support reform and modernization of IT, analytics, and AI across the department’s human capital enterprise.