Jen Buss

Jennifer "Jen" Buss is the chairman and CEO of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, where the institute says she leads research fellows, analysts, scholars, its Board of Regents, and its Board of Directors.¹ NASA's public UAP record identifies her as a Potomac Institute executive selected for its independent study team, giving her dossier relevance as a defense-science policy figure rather than as a UAP witness or firsthand claimant.²³

  Potomac Institute Leadership

Potomac's current leadership profile lists Buss as chairman and CEO and says she advises senior leaders in government agencies, corporations, and start-up enterprises.¹ The institute announced her promotion to CEO on October 5, 2020, saying she would assume the role immediately and join the Board of Directors.⁴ That announcement says she joined Potomac as a Research Fellow in 2012, later served as Assistant Vice President, Vice President, and President, and had overseen day-to-day business and operating functions as president.⁴ Potomac's 2018 announcement of her presidency said her portfolio covered policy recommendations, strategic planning, technology trends and forecasting, and strategic innovation for government customers including DOD, NASA, IC, DARPA, and DOE.⁵

  Defense Science Policy Work

Potomac's STEPS author biography says Buss manages OSD programs, including an outreach effort for the Department of Defense to the start-up community to identify technologies relevant to service and government challenges.⁶ The same biography says she performs science and technology trends analysis, recommends policy solutions, and has directed or assisted research on government contracts involving systematic reviews and gap analyses.⁶ Potomac's 2020 CEO announcement says she helped win proposals, created new centers, oversaw research teams, and held business responsibility for contracts at the institute.⁴ The 2020 announcement also lists her B.S. in Biochemistry with a Mathematics minor from the University of Delaware and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland.⁴

  NASA Human Spaceflight Policy Work

NASA's UAP team announcement said that before Buss became CEO, she worked extensively with NASA on policy issues and strategic planning for astronaut medical care, cancer diagnostics, and therapeutics.² Potomac's author biography separately describes extensive NASA policy-support experience in astronaut medical care and cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.⁶ In 2021, Potomac released the Parastronaut Feasibility Foundational Research Study, saying NASA's Office of the Chief Health Medical Officer engaged the institute to study what would be required for astronauts with disabilities to fly safely to space and return to Earth.⁷ Potomac said that study considered candidates with physical disabilities including lower leg deficiency, short stature, and leg length differences, and included input from medical, military, industry, organizational, and astronaut subject-matter experts.⁷

  NASA UAP Independent Study

NASA announced on October 21, 2022, that Buss was one of 16 members selected for its independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena.² NASA said the study would begin on October 24, 2022, run over about nine months, focus only on unclassified data, and recommend a roadmap for potential NASA UAP data analysis.² NASA's UAP page framed the independent study as an interdisciplinary forum for advice on scientific data, future data collection, analysis techniques, physical constraints, and civilian-airspace reporting protocols.⁸ The final report lists Dr. Jennifer Buss of the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies among the panelists and describes the team as 16 experts from science, technology, data, artificial intelligence, space exploration, aerospace safety, media, and commercial innovation.³

  Report Findings and Limits

The NASA report said the team was assigned to identify available UAP data and outline a roadmap for NASA to obtain usable future data, not to review previous UAP incidents.³ The report said limited high-quality observations and the lack of consistent, detailed, curated data prevent definitive scientific conclusions about UAP.³ NASA's release on the report said the team recommended that NASA use open-source resources, technical expertise, data-analysis techniques, partnerships, and Earth-observing assets to build a stronger dataset for future UAP study.⁹ The report also said the peer-reviewed literature provides no conclusive evidence for an extraterrestrial origin of UAP and that extraterrestrial life should be a last-resort hypothesis after other possibilities are ruled out.³

  People Index Relevance

Buss belongs in this people index because NASA placed a Potomac Institute defense-science policy executive on a public UAP advisory team built around data quality, reporting, aerospace safety, and scientific method.²⁸³ Her documented UAP role is advisory and institutional: the sources support her membership on the NASA team and her broader policy-management background, but they do not make her a source for any specific sighting, retrieval claim, or extraordinary-origin finding.¹²³⁹ The careful reading is that Buss helps connect NASA's UAP process to science-and-technology policy work, defense innovation outreach, human-spaceflight risk questions, and interagency data governance.⁵⁶⁷⁸³

  References

  References

1. potomacinstitute.org ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. nasa.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. nasa.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. prnewswire.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. prnewswire.com ↩ ↩²

6. potomacinstitute.org ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. potomacinstitute.org ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. science.nasa.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. nasa.gov ↩ ↩²