Life Beyond Earth: The Synergy of Energy and Space Exploration

Moderators

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  Mat Hames

  Director and Co-founder, Alpheus Media

  Mat Hames is an Emmy winning Director, known for his two feature length Independent Lens documentaries What Was Ours and When I Rise which premiered at SXSW, Hot Docs, and the Big Sky Documentary Festival and are now streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV. Mat’s directorial debut was Last Best Hope, a nationally broadcast PBS film about the Belgian Resistance and escape lines during WWII, for which he was knighted by Belgian King Albert II. He made the award winning documentary series Power Trip: The Story of Energy and A State of Mind on PBS. Additional films include the Robert Redford-narrated Fighting Goliath for SundanceTV, Art of Home (PBS Living Channel), a series of 10 documentaries with Rooster Teeth called RTDocs, and Emmy award winning film Fossil Country. He is co-founder of Austin based production company Alpheus Media.

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  Dr. Moriba Jah

  Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Privateer Space

  As Chief Scientist, Dr. Jah leads the technical vision for Privateer. Jah is a renowned space environmentalist and astrodynamicist specializing in space object detection, tracking, identification, and characterization, as well as spacecraft navigation. He is an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is the holder of the Mrs. Pearlie Dashiell Henderson Centennial Fellowship in Engineering.

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  Ezinne E. Uzo-Okoro

  Assistant Director for Space Policy, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

  In almost 20 years of U.S. government service, Dr. Uzo-Okoro has developed several national space policies and contributed to over 60 NASA missions and programs – as an engineer, technical expert, manager, and executive – in space science and technology topics. At the White House, she leads the space, aeronautics, and manufacturing portfolios, and has released space policy on Earth Observations, Orbital Debris, LEO including Microgravity research, Space Weather, In-space Servicing Assembly and Manufacturing, Aeronautics, human exploration, and space science. Her 17-year engineering career spanned contributions to earth observations, planetary science, heliophysics, astrophysics, human exploration, and space communications missions, which represent over $9.2 Billion in total program value to NASA. She has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and three masters degrees in Space Systems, Space Robotics, and Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University (APL), MIT (the Media Lab), and Harvard University, respectively. She earned her doctorate degree in Aerospace Engineering from MIT. Her story is profiled in President George W. Bush’s book, Out of Many, One.

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  Dr. Michael E. Webber

  CTO, Energy Impact Partners; and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas

  Dr. Michael E. Webber is the Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and CTO of Energy Impact Partners, a $3 billion cleantech venture fund.

  From September 2018 to August 2021, Webber was based in Paris, France where he served as the Chief Science and Technology Officer at ENGIE, a global energy & infrastructure services company with 170,000 employees worldwide. Webber’s expertise spans research and education at the convergence of engineering, policy, and commercialization on topics related to innovation, energy, and the environment. His book Power Trip: the Story of Energy was published in 2019 by Basic Books with an award-winning 6-part companion series that aired on PBS, Amazon Prime and AppleTV starting Earth Day 2020. The series had more than 7000 broadcasts in the United States and has been distributed in dozens of countries, ultimately reaching millions of viewers. He was selected as a Fellow of ASME (the American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and as a member of the 4th class of the Presidential Leadership Scholars, which is a leadership training program organized by Presidents George W. Bush and William J. Clinton.

  Webber has authored four full-length general interest books, created two interactive textbooks, written more than 500 publications, and been awarded 6 patents. He serves on the advisory board for Scientific American and GTI Energy (an industry consortium formerly known as the Gas Technology Institute). A successful entrepreneur, Webber was one of three founders in 2015 for an educational technology startup, DISCO Learning Media, which was acquired in 2018. Webber holds a B.S. and B.A. from UT Austin, and M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. He was honored as an American Fellow of the German Marshall Fund and an AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellow on four separate occasions by the University of Texas for exceptional teaching.