Melissa Pamer

About Melissa Pamer

Learning new things every day as copy chief in JPL\'s newsroom, working with a stellar team of media reps telling the stories of the lab\'s people — who build the cool stuff and do the research that lets humanity explore our solar system.Before that, I managed a team of journalists who wrote, reported and edited digital news and social media content for KTLA, the pioneering local TV news station in Los Angeles — a market area that serves nearly 19 million people. During my tenure, KTLA.com became one of the top local TV news websites in the country in terms of traffic, consistently ranking in the top five. The quality of journalism on the site was unsurpassed among local TV competitors.My career in online news was preceded by nearly a decade in print journalism, including five years as a local newspaper reporter in the L.A. area. Before I went into journalism, for several years I worked in commercial/film/TV production and post-production in San Francisco and New York.

Experience

1. Copy Chief Media Relations Specialist

   NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

   Dec 2021 — Present · Pasadena, CA, US

   I write about cutting-edge space technology projects and lunar missions being developed at JPL, help journalists to facilitate accurate and interesting coverage of this fascinating work, and edit the writing of my fellow media reps in the lab\'s media office.Projects I work with include- CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration), a team of three small autonomous rovers bound for the Moon- Farside Seismic Suite, a CLPS payload that will gather NASA\'s first seismic data from the Moon in nearly 50 years and the first ever from the far side - EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor), a snake-like, self-propelled autonomous robot for exploring unknown and extreme terrain- concepts such as FLOAT (Flexible Levitation on a Track), a robotic railway system to provide autonomous payload transport on the Moon, and SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers), a swarm of cellphone-size robots to look for signs of life underwater on icy moons

Education

• University of Southern California

  M.A.

• New York University

  Sight & Sound film production spring semester undergraduate program

• Brown University

  B.A., magna cum laude