Chandria Poole started taking computers apart as an 11-year-old in her grandfather’s office at the local agriculture department.  Now she is putting data together again on the Cloud for large defense systems.

As deputy program manager of a Cyber Program at Northrup Grumman, Chandria Poole is the technical lead for a critical cyber contract. She leads the transformation of large data systems to secure cloud services platform.

A recipient of the coveted Top Performer Rating, Chandria is routinely sought after to support major proposal efforts offering computing power, database storage, and content delivery to help cloud solutions.

Kenneth L. Robinson, vice president of the strategic force programs business unit in Northrop Grumman’s Space Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Division was proud to present the Most Promising Engineer Award to Chandra at the 2018 BEYA STEM Conference.

“She has represented Northrop Grumman Values by leading her team with integrity towards quality deliveries and participating fully in community outreach. I am proud to present Chandria Poole,” he said.

Chandria has spent over 9 years in Software engineering.

She chose to be an engineer because she found she could channel all her curiosity, energy, and creativity into a field where she could impact society in an amazing way.

“As a young girl from a town of 1800 people, big opportunities were scarce,” Chandria said.

“Every woman I knew was an administrator, social worker or nurse. But my grandfather put me to work at 11 years old, making me answer phones at his office within USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). There were tons of computers there and I’d often secretly take computers apart and put them back together,” she confessed.

“Now I’ve developed software for some of the largest systems in the defense industry. With prayer, determination, and encouragement from my family I attained dreams that were always so much bigger than my surroundings, so can you,” Chandria said.