Meet the Crew

Cody
Paige

Director, Space Exploration Initiative
Camera Project Lead

Dr. Cody Paige is the Director of the Space Exploration Initiative at the Media Lab, a team of 50+ students, faculty and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Her research focused on enabling a permanent human presence on the Moon through the development of wearable radiation shielding material and a virtual reality platform for geological surface exploration of the Moon and Mars. She is also working on a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences at Dalhousie University with a thesis in improving quaternary geochronology methods using Carbon-14. She completed her Master of Applied Science at the University of Toronto in Aerospace Engineering and her Bachelor of Applied Science from Queen’s University in Engineering Physics. She is passionate about student outreach, in particular encouraging girls, and young women in STEM. Cody is also a pilot, an avid hiker and rock climber.

Ariel
Ekblaw

MIT Lunar Mission Principal Investigator

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 leads the MIT “To the Moon to Stay Mission” and developed MIT’s “Operating in the Lunar Environment Course” that incubated and advised this first cohort of lunar surface payloads. Ariel co-teaches the course with MIT AeroAstro Professor and former astronaut, Jeffrey Hoffman. Ariel is also the founding CEO of Aurelia Institute, a hybrid space architecture research institute and venture incubation studio. Through this connected ecosystem, she strives to bring humanity’s space exploration future to life.

Ariel graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University and designed a novel space architecture habitat for her MIT PhD in autonomously self-assembling space structures. Her research work and the labs she leads build towards future habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Ariel is the author/editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT Press 2021). She serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee, guiding and shaping the coming decade of burgeoning activity on the moon. Ariel has had the rare honor and pleasure of working directly on space hardware that now operates on the surface of Mars and is leading MIT's return to the moon. Ariel’s work has been featured in WIRED (March 2020 cover story), MIT Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, NPR, PRI’s Science Friday, IEEE and AIAA proceedings, and more.

Dava
Newman

Director, MIT Media Lab

Dava Newman is the director of the MIT Media Lab. She holds the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is a Harvard–MIT Health, Sciences, and Technology faculty member in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow (a chair for making significant contributions to undergraduate education); and was the former Director of the Technology and Policy Program at MIT (2003–2015); and Director of the MIT–Portugal Program (2011–2015, 2017-2021). As the Director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program (TPP), she led this unique multidisciplinary graduate program with over 1,300 alums and faculty advisors from all 5 Schools across the Institute. She has been a faculty leader in Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT’s School of Engineering for 28 years.

Fangzheng
Liu

AstroAnt Project Lead

Fangzheng Liu is a second-year PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, studying in the Responsive Environments group, advised by Prof. Joseph A. Paradiso and Dr. Ariel Ekblaw.

Fangzheng’s main research interests are miniature robotic swarm and wireless sensor networks for space explorations.

Fangzheng got his first Masters degree in Signal and Information Processing from China in 2018. After that, he went to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), and worked as an engineer in the AMS-02 (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) experiment, a state-of-the-art particle physics detector operating on the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment is led by Nobel Laureate of physics Prof. Samuel C. C. Ting.

After a year of work at CERN, Fangzheng came to the MIT Media Lab. He received his second Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab in 2021 and now is pursuing a Ph.D.

Maya
Nasr

HUMANS Project Lead

Scientist at Harvard and EDF, focusing on the mission planning for in-orbit calibrations and the development of machine learning models for the MethaneSAT project, with expertise in spacecraft operations, engineering systems, technology strategy, and space law and policy. Holds Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degrees in Aerospace Engineering from MIT. Passionate about increasing global representation and access in the space sector and raising awareness about nationality-based discrimination. Project lead and co-founder of HUMANS, an ISS and Lunar symbolic avenue for space access worldwide. Also served as co-lead of the Space Law & Policy Project Group at SGAC. Experienced in several space projects, including MOXIE for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, Cassini’s mission activity on Titan, and the OneWeb satellites network.