Ariel Ekblaw
Founder & CEO, Aurelia Institute | GP, Aurelia Foundry Fund
BACKGROUND
Dr. Ariel Ekblaw founded the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of 50+ students, faculty, and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration; Ariel is also the founding CEO of Aurelia Institute and GP for Aurelia Foundry Fund, a hybrid space architecture research institute and venture incubation studio.
Ariel brings a humanist approach to her research, with undergraduate degrees in Physics, and Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University and a PhD from MIT in autonomously self-assembling space structures. Ariel’s prior work experience includes supersymmetry research and big data programming at the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory, user-centered design and product development at Microsoft Azure, microgravity research with NASA, and Mars2020 rover hardware systems engineering at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Ariel is the author/editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT Press 2021) and serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee. Ariel’s work has been featured in WIRED, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, NPR, numerous academic papers, and more. Humanity stands on the cusp of interplanetary civilization and space is our next, grand frontier. This opportunity to design our interplanetary lives beckons to us—Ariel strives to bring our space exploration future to life.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. Dissertation – Self-Aware Self-Assembly for Space Architecture: growth paradigms for in-space manufacturing, MIT Media Lab, 2020
M.S. in Distributed Systems, MIT Media Lab, 2017
B.S. Double Major in Physics, and Mathematics and Philosophy, Yale University, 2014
