Advancement council

Kevin L. Jones has worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center for more than 25 years. He has been recognized for his accomplishments and has received multiple awards for his leadership of several international, federal, agency and center information technology networking projects and initiatives. 

He began his career at Ames as the kindergarten through twelfth grade Internet Initiative project manager where he worked to bring the Internet into all school classrooms. He also supported projects and network support to upgrade the Ames Research Center Local Area Network. Jones then spent many years enabling NASA Research and Science with his work on the NASA Research and Education Network, or NREN, as part of the Next Generation Internet Initiative. For both the NREN project office and later when NREN was primarily focused on supporting NASA High End Computing in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, Jones provided extensive network engineering and project management support. During this time, he was instrumental in establishing several key agreements including the contracts for the various NREN backbones.

Jones served as the acting deputy chief information officer at Ames for six months before returning to the Ames CIO office to become the NASA Internet protocol version six, or IPv6 transition manager. While in this role, he also became the NASA E-root Domain Name Server point contact where he managed a complete overhaul of the equipment and the support services NASA provides to the global Internet. At the federal level, he held several IPv6 leadership positions: fedv6 outreach co-chair, fedv6 vice chair, and fedv6 chairperson making considerable progress to move the federal IPv6 implementation efforts forward.

Jones has been an active member of the Ames African American Advisory Group and previously served as chair. In 2020, he co-authored a letter to center leadership providing recommendations to combat anti-Black racism and assisted the associate center director in developing a Community Protective Services Advisory Group Charter. Jones is an active member of the National Society of Black Engineers, a Lifetime member of Blacks in Government, and a member of the national Inclusion Allies Coalition.

Jones earned a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley and a master of science in management from the Notre Dame De Namur University.  He is a certified project management professional member of the Project Management Institute.