Speakers

Confirmed Speakers

Laurie Leshin

Dr. Laurie Leshin is University Professor for Space Futures at Arizona State University (ASU), where she advises senior leadership on space, research, and higher education. She works closely with ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, the University Design Institute, the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, and others. She is a former Bren Professor of Geochemistry and Planetary Science at Caltech and a co-investigator for two instruments on NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover. From 2022 to 2025, she served as Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL), where she guided major missions in Earth science, planetary exploration, and astrophysics, and she continues. Prior to leading NASA JPL, Prof. Leshin held a number of senior positions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, including Director of Science, Deputy Director of Science and Technology, and Deputy Associate Administrator of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, overseeing future human spaceflight. She has also served as President of Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Dean of the School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her honors include NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal and Distinguished Public Service Medal. The International Astronomical Union named asteroid 4922 Leshin to recognize her contribution to planetary science.

Hiro Ono

Dr. Masahiro (Hiro) Ono will join Georgia Tech’s Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering as an Associate Professor in July 2026, after more than a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . At JPL, he served as a Research Technologist and Group Supervisor of the Robotic Surface Mobility Group, leading the $15M EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) project to develop a snake-like robot for exploring Enceladus’s subsurface ocean . He also led the MAARS project on autonomous rover systems and contributed to the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, where he developed enhanced autonomous driving and led traversability analysis for landing site selection . He received JPL’s 2021 Software of the Year Award for his ML-based terrain classifier and led the AI4Mars crowdsourcing initiative with ~17,000 volunteers . He holds a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT .

Srikanth Saripalli

Dr. Srikanth Saripalli holds the J. Mike Walker ’66 Professorship in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A &M University, where he is the Director, Center for Autonomous Vehicles and Sensor Systems. Dr. Saripalli received his Ph.D. and Masters in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2003 and 2007 respectively, and his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences in 1999. After acquiring his Ph.D., Dr. Saripalli was a Member of Technical Staff at JPL where he was a member of the Robotic Software systems Group in the Mobility and Robotic Systems Section. His research interests include control of unmanned aerial vehicles, vision based control, visual serving and control of complex hybrid systems.