By Jorge Mercado Friday, March 27th, 2026

Space imaging is her universe

As a kid, Megan Tremer was used to moving around. Her father, a metallurgist, relocated his family from her hometown of Pittsburgh to Oklahoma and France.

And though it was tough constantly being on the move, Tremer said it “made me very adaptable to change,” something that has suited her well throughout her career.  That’s especially true in her role as president of space imaging at Thousand Oaks-based Teledyne Technologies.

“What I’ve done a lot of during my career is run into fires and into problems in order to solve them, which ends up being a really nice career and experience accelerator when you’re willing to do that,” Tremer told the Business Times during an interview at Teledyne’s Camarillo headquarters for the imaging operation.

She’s come a long way from soldering USB connections at a lab in upstate New York to leading a team that built some of the most important sensors on the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest space telescope designed to conduct infrared astronomy. 

Tremer has spent her career in sciences and the emerging technology sector. As a kid, she had a tough time deciding between being a writer and embracing the STEM field. Once she arrived at Northeastern University in Boston, Tremer chose physics. 

Northeastern was also the perfect place for Tremer. The university has a co-op program, in which students attend classes for six months, then work for six months through their tenure at the school. Only about 60 universities in the United States run such a program.

For Tremer, who earned her Master’s degree as the financial crisis in 2007-08 unfolded, having that job experience was crucial to joining the workforce. It was also during her program that she worked on some pretty cutting-edge technology.

At the University of Rochester, Tremer started work at the laser lab, where her team was were working on inertial confinement fusion, a type of fusion energy research that attempts to initiate nuclear fusion reactions by heating and compressing a fuel target.

While she loved her time there, she also realized the academic route wasn’t right for her.

“The day that I was soldering two USB cables together because we couldn’t afford to buy the proper USB cable, I realized this is not how I want to spend my time for the rest of my life,” Tremer said with a laugh.

But it was that work on the cutting-edge of some amazing innovations throughout her collegiate years that kept Tremer engaged and put her on the path to where she is today.

“It helped me hone what I wanted to do,” Tremer said. “If you spend four years and then you graduate and find out this isn’t actually what I wanted, you’re in a world of hurt, and I think being able to see what direction I really wanted to go was extremely valuable to me.”

As the president of space imaging at Teledyne, Tremer is doing some incredibly innovative work. 

One example is the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest space telescope designed to conduct infrared astronomy, which has more than a dozen infrared sensors manufactured by Teledyne. 

The telescope, which was designed to study the earliest stars in the universe and other cosmic happenings,  was launched into space on Dec. 25, 2021, and has produced some amazing imagery of deep space. Teledyne’s space imaging operations are located in Camarillo.

The feat is nothing short of spectacular, said Tremer, especially when considering that in 2026, Teledyne will launch its 1,000th detector into space. None have failed, something that all the employees on the space imaging side are extremely proud of, Tremer said.

“There’s a tremendous responsibility that comes with a project like this, because when you’re building a high-technology product that’s going to go a couple of million miles away, there’s no return. There’s no flying up there and just fixing it,” Tremer said. “And then with the responsibility comes the thrills and chills of the scientific discovery.”

A similar project that has Tremer excited: the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a future flagship space telescope to hunt for planets that are Earth-like within 100 light-years of Earth. Tremer explained the various feats that needed to be achieved in order for the telescope to accomplish its mission. Her excitement grew with each explanation, from first having to locate a star with a planet next to it (think the sun and Earth) to then having the telescope block out that star and still being able to detect the atmosphere of the planet to determine if it could support life.

“We went to dinner with this crew and we were talking about this mission and the thing that stuck with me is the people sitting around this table are most likely humans that will discover life on other planets,” Tremer said with a smile. “How could that not make you excited?”

Her energy radiates throughout the offices in Camarillo, making her an effective leader, said Scott Murguia, a contracts director at Teledyne Space Imaging. 

“It’s pretty rare that you get high-equal parts EQ and IQ, but that really would be Megan in a nutshell,” he said. “Megan, at her very core, is all about the science and genuinely excited by all the innovations. She just genuinely loves anything to do with science.”

Murguia has worked with Tremer for over a decade since the two first met at Raytheon. He said he is “blessed” to have worked with her for so long, adding that “she creates a truly safe working environment, because she genuinely listens and reflects on what we all do and say to her, not just as executives but everyone.”

Murguia added that working on such high-level projects is truly a blessing, saying that “to even play a small role in building something so incredible is rewarding.” It is something they all share, including Tremer.

“We’re delivering capabilities that the world needs. From understanding the early universe to understanding climate change to defense capabilities, these missions keep me and a lot of us going,” Tremer said. “We are a hungry company and we want to continue to develop and evolve and I find that energizing.” 

As a woman in STEM throughout her career, Tremer has faced many of the hardships that one would come to expect, but she has learned to embrace it as best she can. When she first moved to California from Boston for her job at Raytheon, Tremer had two children, both under the age of two.

She was “terrified of trying to be a good mom and also a good worker at the same time.” Common advice at the time was to try to keep your work life and at-home life as separate as possible, but Tremer embraced the opposite. 

“I have been on calls with a baby napping on my shoulder and I am just really proud of that,” Tremer said. “As women, we are either held to a higher standard, or we hold ourselves to a higher standard of wanting to make sure that we earn and we pull our weight and I think as we see more women join the field, we are making the space for normalized so women aren’t so fearful of things they shouldn’t have ever been fearful of.”

She also credits her husband, Zach, her high school sweetheart, for allowing her to take the risks she has, saying he has always been 110% supportive.

One of those risks included taking on a major role at Teledyne. Tremer was working at Flir in Goleta when Teledyne announced it would be acquiring the company for more than $8 billion, the largest deal ever completed in the region by a wide margin.

At the time, Teledyne was interested in hiring Tremer but she had some doubts about moving up to a bigger role. Ultimately, Tremer made the jump and took the reins of president of space imaging at Teledyne in May 2025, a role that means a lot to her for reasons that are professional and personal.

“I’m really proud that my daughter is completely fearless and doesn’t have any sense of well, ‘Well, I can only do this because this is how womanhood is supposed to look,’ and I can work together with my son on a project because he says, ‘Hey, you like math, do math with us,’ and it’s just so refreshing because that probably didn’t happen a couple of decades ago,” Tremer said. “I have been really fortunate in my life.”

email: [email protected]