Courtney Draggon is the Director of the Office of Organizational Excellence at the National Weather Service (NWS). In this role, she leads and manages activities that enhance NWS efforts to build a Weather-Ready Nation by applying big-picture, strategic thinking to agency priorities, challenging the status quo, strengthening organizational health and culture, and expanding connections with external enterprise stakeholders.

Previously, Courtney served as Director of the National Weather Service International Affairs Office, where she was responsible for supporting the NWS mission and operations through international engagement. The International Affairs Office mission is to provide significant strategic and technical leadership to the global weather, climate, and water community so that the community can make increasingly well-informed social and economic decisions. It also provides leadership in facilitating the agency’s collaboration with the global hydro-meteorological community.

Courtney holds a Master’s degree in International Relations with a concentration in conflict resolution from American University’s School of International Service. Prior to joining the National Weather Service, Courtney worked for the State Department as well as in the non-profit sector doing conflict resolution training for water engineers in Turkey and Cyprus.

Courtney has worked for the NWS since 2004, starting as a Presidential Management Fellow. Throughout her tenure at NWS, Courtney has represented the NWS in all regions of the world and has served as head or alternate head of delegation to numerous World Meteorological Organization meetings.

Courtney previously served as the acting director of the Office of Organizational Excellence, the lead for the Operations and Workforce Analysis project, a team member on the NWS headquarters restructuring team, and as a senior policy advisor to NOAA’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction as well as worked as an advisor in the Office of the NWS Director. In her capacity as the Director of International Affairs, Courtney was the U.S. lead, serving on an eight-country team, for the WMO restructuring and governance realignment project, a four-year effort that overhauled how the WMO decision-making and technical bodies were structured as well as how they engaged in planning and execution.

Courtney completed the DOC SES Candidate Development Program in October of 2017. During her time in the program, Courtney served as the Transition Lead for the Census Enterprise Data Collection and Processing (CEDCaP) Program Management Office in the U.S. Census Bureau Information Technology Directorate. In this role, she successfully led a team to update a major IT system Program Office Estimate and developed a required Congressional report that affected future budget planning and appropriations including program plans for the core functional areas of human, financial, and information technology resources, as well as communication and change management processes required to ensure delivery of an enterprise IT solution.

Courtney was raised in the Washington, DC, area and has lived with her family in Chile, Brazil, and the Republic of South Korea. She is married with two children.

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