Mason Space Day Speakers

Kjell N. Lindgren was selected by NASA in 2009. Growing up in an Air Force family, he spent most of his childhood abroad and returned to the U.S. to complete his education with an undergraduate degree from the U.S. Airforce Academy and a Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Colorado. He is residency trained in both emergency and aerospace medicine. He joined NASA as a flight surgeon in 2007 and served as the Deputy Crew Surgeon for STS-130 and Expedition 24. He was selected as an astronaut in June 2009 as one of 14 members of the 20th NASA astronaut class. In 2015, Dr. Lindgren flew on Expedition 44/45 and logged 141 days in space. He participated in two spacewalks and in more than a hundred different scientific experiments. Dr. Lindgren served as commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-4 mission. Crew-4 launched on Apr. 27, 2022 to the International Space Station joining Expedition 67 for an additional 170 days on orbit, returning home on Oct. 14, 2022. Dr. Lindgren has spent a cumulative total of 311 days in space. He currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD).

Oleg Goushcha is an aerospace research engineer at NASA Langley Research Center and is a part of a team responsible for analyzing aerodynamics of the Space Launch System (SLS), a vehicle that will propel a crewed Orion capsule to the Moon on future Artemis missions. His efforts include supporting large-scale wind-tunnel tests, which are used to predict the aerodynamic environments experienced by the SLS vehicle during its ascent through the atmosphere. Goushcha also supported Artemis I pre-flight and launch activities to characterize and collect developmental flight instrumentation data, which was used post-flight to validate wind-tunnel predictions. Prior to joining NASA, Goushcha taught as an assistant professor at Manhattan College Mechanical Engineering Department. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from University of California, Irvine. He completed his PhD studies at The City College of New York.

Caelus Rocketry (formerly known as Project Caelus) is an aerospace nonprofit consisting entirely of high school students. Their goal is to design, build, test, and launch the first high schooler-built bipropellant liquid-fueled rocket to the edge of space while creating opportunities that introduce the community to the ever-growing aerospace industry and the importance of STEM education in an increasingly technological world. Through this project, they hope to show young people that it’s possible to do something that has never been done before and that there is no age threshold to exploring science and pushing technological boundaries.

As founder of the non-profit Dark Sky Friends and an advocate of DarkSky International, Eileen Kragie is committed to educating people about responsible outdoor light at night. She joined DarkSky International, became an advocate and created the new Northern Virginia chapter DarkSky NOVA. She founded Dark Sky Friends to focus on legislation to protect human and environmental health and the night environment. Eileen’s work includes securing proclamations recognizing the problem of light pollution from state and local jurisdictions and working with local government to enact, improve, and enforce lighting ordinances and legislation. Exhibiting, public outreach and hosting events for light pollution education include Wolf Trap National Park’s Bat and Firefly Festivals, the National Book Festival, presentations to local organizations, displays and writing articles. Eileen has worked in both private industry and government. She holds a BS from George Mason University in Business and an MS from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Policy Analysis and Public Management.

Peter Pachowicz is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, George Mason University.  His current interests include CubeSats, SatCom, and SpaceCom. He is leading activities in these areas at the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC). Specific CubeSat areas of his interest include: ultra-small-factor satellite bus engineering, resilient satellite bus architectures, and rad-hard embedded software. His interests in satellite communications are oriented towards design of low-noise antennas, signal and data fusion, and custom software defined radios. He is responsible for the development of the CEC SatCom and SpaceCom ground stations which include a 9.1-meter and 2.4-meter satellite dishes, as well as the ECE CubeSat Engineering Lab. He is also responsible for a SmallSat Engineering certificate and Space-Based Systems specialization areas as part of ECE graduate programs.  

Peter Plavchan is an associate professor of Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University and the Executive Director of George Mason Observatories. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Missouri State University and a research scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. His research focuses on exoplanets around low-mass stars, specializing in precise radial velocity techniques at near-infrared wavelengths. He discovered the AU Mic planetary system, published in Nature in 2020. Currently, Plavchan is PI of the NASA Landolt mission and the HaZE mission concept. He has built instrumentation for the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and uses ground-based telescopes worldwide and in space with the Spitzer, Kepler, TESS, and James Webb Space Telescope missions.

Tom is a member of the Board of DarkSky International and has served as President since January 2023. His environmental activism included a decade fighting water pollution with local riverkeeper organizations on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. In 2013, seeing the Andromeda Galaxy for the first time with his naked eyes from atop Kitt Peak rekindled an interest in astronomy and a desire to eliminate light pollution.  He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School. Tom retired from law practice in 2019, having spent most of his career representing airlines and railroads in labor and employment matters, including extensive experience translating scientific experts for lay decision-makers. Currently residing in Northern Virginia and Tucson, Arizona, Tom and his wife Chris travel extensively in the United States seeking dark sky locations. For several years he assisted DarkSky as a volunteer on legal and public policy issues at the national level before becoming a Board member.  In Northern Virginia, he is one of the founding members of DarkSky NOVA.

Shobita Satyapal is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University who leads the Black Hole Galaxy Connection Group. Her research centers on understanding the connection between the growth and evolution of supermassive black holes and the host galaxies in which they reside. She utilizes space- and ground-based multi-wavelength data from numerous observatories including Chandra, XMM-Newton, WISE, Spitzer, the Very Large Array (VLA), Gemini, the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), and Keck. She recently was awarded time on JWST to search for intermediate mass black holes. Prior to joining Mason, she was an instrument scientist for JWST at NASA Goddard. Professor Satyapal is the recipient of numerous awards including the Presidential Early Career Award.

Erdal Yiğit received his PhD from the University College London, UK, in 2009 in physics. In March 2009, he moved to the USA to work at the University of Michigan's Atmospheric Oceanic and Space Sciences Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Researcher. In 2012, he moved to California for a Postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, where he has later been promoted to an Assistant Research Physicist position that he kept till August 2013. In September 2013, he joined George Mason University's Department of Physics and Astronomy as a tenure-track faculty member. He was granted tenure in 2018. His research interests cover topics from atmospheric, space and planetary sciences, in particular, global modeling of and internal wave effects in planetary atmospheres, such as, Earth and Mars. He is the developer of the first whole atmosphere gravity wave parameterization suitable for general circulation models of planetary atmospheres. He is the recipient of the 2016 Zeldovich Medal jointly presented by COSPAR and the Russian Academy of Sciences for his significant contributions to the study of coupling between the lower and upper atmospheres on Earth and Mars by gravity waves. He is the sole author of the Springer's two-volume monograph series on "Atmospheric and Space Sciences" one on Neutral atmospheres and the second on Ionospheres and Plasma Environments. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia (VA), USA.

Jie Zhang works on solar physics, heliospheric physics and space weather. He studies the physical mechanism that generates solar storms, i.e., flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). He also studies the magnetic evolution of solar active regions and how the evolution leads to energy buildup, instability, and eruption. His research also addresses propagation and evolution of CMEs in the interplanetary space. He also puts effort into transforming these research activities into tools for predicting solar flares and Earth-impact of CMEs. His work serves the practical purpose of making advanced space weather predictions that can mitigate adverse space weather effects on human space exploration, satellites, communication, and navigation.