AIAA LA-LV 8/21 Dinner Meeting
(No AIAA Membership is required for attening this event.)
(Full-Time Student with valid Student ID can enjoy free Presentation Only - No Meal Ticket (Limited Seats))

Exoplanets !

In Search of Habitable Worlds

by

Dr. Jessie Christiansen
Research Scientist, Deputy Science Lead
Caltech/IPAC-NASA Exoplanet Science Institute

Dr. Niraj  K. Inamdar
Senior Principal Systems Engineer
Raytheon Airbone and Space Systems

The Speakers

Dr. Jessie Christiansen
Research Scientist, Deputy Science Lead
Caltech/IPAC-NASA Exoplanet Science Institute

Dr Jessie Christiansen is an astrophysicist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, where she searches for, characterises and catalogues planets orbiting other stars. In 2018 she was awarded the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal for her role with the successful NASA Kepler Mission, which discovered thousands of exoplanets and revealed that rocky planets are common throughout the galaxy. She now works on the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to find the nearest planetary systems to Earth – systems that will be ripe for further study with the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes.

Dr. Niraj  K. Inamdar
Senior Principal Systems Engineer
Raytheon Airbone and Space Systems

Dr. Niraj Inamdar is a Senior Principal Systems Engineer at Raytheon. Over the past decade, Dr. Inamdar has worked in fields as varied as exoplanetary science and planet formation theory; X-ray spectroscopy; mechanical design and analysis; spacecraft attitude dynamics and control; and bioengineering and microfluidics. Before joining Raytheon, he was a physical scientist at RAND Corporation, where his work focused on technical challenges related to national security and defense. Prior to that, he was a space systems architect at The Aerospace Corporation, while as a graduate student, he was an engineer and Science Lead on the Regolith X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS) instrument flying on NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in planetary sciences in 2016, his master's degree from MIT in mechanical engineering in 2011, and his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008.