Colleen Donovan is the Senior Technical Specialist (STS) for Flight Deck Human Factors in the FAA’s Office of Senior Technical Experts (AIR-20). Ms. Donovan has over 30 years of experience in aviation human factors and focuses her work on interfaces between the pilot and flight deck systems, automation, workload, human error, and alerting. She evaluates systems and develops policy for FAA’s flight test pilots, engineers, and human factors specialists. She successfully leads the development and coordination of national and international aviation human factors standards, policy and guidance, and research requiring multi-agency and multi-disciplinary coordination. Ms. Donovan also has extensive experience conducting human factors research studies, as well as managing human factors research grants and contracts for the FAA, the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, and the Battelle Memorial Institute.

Ms. Donovan gained international experience as a Human Factors Fellow for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialized agency of the United Nations located in Montreal, Canada. She was instrumental in producing ICAO’s first version of the Safety Management Manual, creating ICAO’s first regulatory and guidance material on Electronic Flight Bags, and hosting ICAO’s first symposium on Unmanned Aircraft Systems.

Ms. Donovan also has over five years of experience providing direct support, serving as the Senior Technical Advisor and later as the Acting Deputy Chief of Staff, to FAA Administrator, Deputy Administrator, Chief of Staff, and the Associate Administrator for the NextGen Organization. She has a B.S. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and an M.S. in Experimental Psychology from Northeastern University in Boston. Donovan also has her private pilot’s license.