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BioSimone D’Amico is Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AA), W.M. Keck Faculty Scholar in the School of Engineering, Associate Professor of Geophysics (by Courtesy), Science Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chief Science Officer at EraDrive Inc. He is the Founding Director of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory, Founding Co-Director of the Center for AEroSpace Autonomy Research (CAESAR), and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Aerospace Engineering at Stanford. He has 23+ years of experience in research and development of autonomous spacecraft and distributed space systems. He developed and deployed the distributed Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) system of several formation-flying, rendezvous and proximity operations missions such as GRACE (NASA/DLR), PRISMA (OHB/DLR/CNES/DTU), TanDEM-X (DLR), BIROS (DLR) and PROBA-3 (ESA). Currently, he is the institutional PI of four autonomous satellite swarms funded by NASA (STARLING, STARI) and by NSF (VISORS, SWARM-EX). Dr. D'Amico is Fellow of AAS, Associate Fellow of AIAA, Associate Editor of the AIAA's JGCD and he is in the Advisory Board of four space start-ups focusing on distributed space systems for future applications in SAR remote sensing, orbital lifetime prolongation, and space-based solar power. He was the recipient of several awards, most recently the 2024 NASA Ames Honor Award for the Starling mission, Best Paper Awards at IAF (2022), IEEE (2021), AIAA (2021), AAS (2019) conferences, the M. Barry Carlton Award by IEEE (2020), the Leonardo 500 Award by the Leonardo da Vinci Society/ISSNAF (2019), FAI/NAA’s Group Diploma of Honor (2018), DLR’s Sabbatical/Forschungssemester (2012) and Wissenschaft Preis (2006), and NASA’s Group Achievement Award for the GRACE mission (2004). He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Politecnico di Milano (2003) and the Ph.D. degree from Delft University of Technology (2010).

Adam Dai

Research Asst - Graduate, Program-Gao, G.

Sydney Ellyn Sojourner Davis

Undergraduate, Aeronautics and Astronautics

Contact Info
Mail Code: 6150
syddavis@stanford.edu

Henry Demarest

Masters Student in Aeronautics and Astronautics, admitted Autumn 2025

Contact Info
hdem@stanford.edu

Luigi Di Lillo

Affiliate, Program-Pavone, M.

BioAt Stanford, my work bridges autonomous systems, safety, and insurance through probabilistic risk modeling under uncertainty and in sparse-data regimes.

Duncan Eddy

Postdoctoral Scholar, Aeronautics and Astronautics

BioDuncan Eddy is a research fellow in the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He completed his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Stanford, funded by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. His current research is focused on decision-making in safety-critical, climate, and space systems, where operational decisions must be made quickly and correctly in complex environments while still being explainable and understandable by human stakeholders.

He is currently the Executive Director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety, and a post-doctoral researcher with appointments in Mineral-X and the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL).

Prior to this, He started and led the Spacecraft Operations Group at Capella Space, the first US Commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar Earth Imaging constellation. There he developed the first fully-automated mission operations system, realizing lights-out tasking-to-delivery of radar satellite data for a commercial constellation. He subsequently started and led the Constellation Operations and Space Safety Groups at Project Kuiper. Most recently, he was a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services, where he worked on building software services for large-scale distributed edge compute applications.

Contact Info
deddy@stanford.edu

Sigrid Elschot

Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics

BioSigrid Elschot is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and founding director of the Space Environment and Satellite Systems laboratory. Her research focuses on understanding and mitigating the space environment to enable more resilient spacecraft for interplanetary and interstellar exploration. Her work includes space weather detection and modeling, which is central to Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Space Domain Awareness (SDA), achieved by integrating in situ and remote sensing data with high fidelity simulations to characterize space hazards. Current efforts include experimental and computational studies of hypervelocity dust and debris impacts on spacecraft using dust accelerators, light-gas guns, and Particle-In-Cell simulations, and ground-based radar to remotely characterize space debris and meteoroid populations. Prof. Elschot also leads research programs in hypersonic plasma physics relevant to atmospheric re-entry vehicles, and space energy harvesting for spacecraft power and propulsion. Prof. Elschot has been the recipient of several awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), NSF CAREER award, DoE CAREER award, Outstanding Mentor Award and Outstanding Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Anton Ermakov

Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and, by courtesy, of Geophysics and of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am interested in the formation and evolution of the Solar System bodies and the ways we can constrain planetary interiors by geophysical measurements.

Contact Info

Web page:

http://web.stanford.edu/people/aie

Charbel Farhat

Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCharbel Farhat and his Research Group (FRG) develop mathematical models, advanced computational algorithms, and high-performance software for the design, analysis, and digital twinning of complex systems in aerospace, marine, mechanical, and naval engineering. They contribute major advances to Simulation-Based Engineering Science. Current engineering foci in research are on reliable autonomous carrier landing in rough seas; dissipation of vertical landing energies through structural flexibility; nonlinear aeroelasticity of N+3 aircraft with High Aspect Ratio (HAR) wings; pulsation and flutter of a parachute; pendulum motion in main parachute clusters; coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) in supersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerators for Mars landing; flight dynamics of hypersonic systems and their trajectories; and advanced digital twinning. Current theoretical and computational emphases in research are on high-performance, multi-scale modeling for the high-fidelity analysis of multi-component, multi-physics problems; discrete-event-free embedded boundary methods for CFD and FSI; efficient Bayesian optimization using physics-based surrogate models; modeling and quantifying model-form uncertainty; probabilistic, physics-based machine learning; mechanics-informed artificial neural networks for data-driven constitutive modeling; and efficient nonlinear projection-based model order reduction for time-critical applications such as design, active control, and digital twinning.