James Lauer Green is an American physicist currently serving as the NASA Chief Scientist. He received his Ph.D. in Space Physics from the University of Iowa in 1979 and has worked at NASA ever since. He began working in the Magnetospheric Physics Branch at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in 1980. At Marshall, Green developed and managed the Space Physics Analysis Network that provided scientists with access to data. From 1985 to 1992 he was the head of the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) at Goddard Space Flight Center. The NSSDC is NASA's largest space science data archive. He was the Chief of the Space Science Data Operations Office from 1992 until 2005, when he became the Chief of the Science Proposal Support Office. While at Goddard, Green was a co-investigator and the De