Air Space Structuring
Parimal Kopardekar (NASA Aeronautics Research Institute (NARI))
Parimal Kopardekar (PK) serves as the Director of NASA Aeronautics Research Institute (NARI). In that capacity, he is responsible for exploring new trends, collaborations and partnership needs related to aviation enterprise. He also serves as NASA's senior technologist for Air Transportation Systems and principal investigator for the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) project. He is the recipient of many awards, including NASA Government Invention of the Year, Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal, Outstanding Leadership Award, Engineer of the Year Award, and Samuel J. Heyman Service to America’s Promising Innovation Award. PK was named among 25 most influential people in drone industry. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Aerospace Operations and Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He also serves as an adjunct faculty and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses related to operations management and supply chain management.
Dasom Lee (University of Twente)
Dasom Lee is an Assistant Professor of Digitalized Sustainable Energy in the Department of Technology and Governance for Sustainability at the University of Twente, Netherlands. She is also affiliated with the Strategic Intelligence for Digitalization of Societal Domains research platform. She received has Ph.D. in Sociology with a minor in Quantitative Methods from Vanderbilt University, USA. Her research interests include energy transitions, cyber-physical systems, innovation, and environmental and economic sociology.
Karthik Gopalakrishnan (MIT)
Karthik Gopalakrishnana is a PhD student in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, affiliated with the ICAT and DINaMo research groups, and advised by Prof. Hamsa Balakrishnan. Previously, he obtained his SM from MIT, and B.Tech (Hons.) from IIT Madras.
He is working towards a future where self-driving cars, autonomous drones, air-taxis, and aerial robots are a part of everyday life. In Karthik's research, he develops mathematical methods for optimization, control, and learning in networked systems. These methods lay the foundation for autonomous mobile systems that will transform transportation, logistics and supply chain, urban monitoring, and industrial automation. During his PhD, Karthik has worked on applications ranging from aircraft scheduling, data privacy, traffic management for unmanned aircraft systems and urban air mobility, communication security, and shared mobility platforms.
Mark Mueller (UC Berkeley)
Mark W. Mueller is an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, whose research focuses on the design and control of aerial robots. He joined the mechanical engineering department at UC Berkeley in September 2016, after spending some time at Verity Studios working on a drone entertainment system, installed in the biggest theater on New York's broadway. He completed his PhD studies at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 2015, and received an MSc there in 2011. He received a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Tobias Biehle (Technical University Berlin)
Mr. Tobias Biehle is a PhD student and research associate at the Technische Universität Berlin. He is presenting the key findings of the social science research project "The Sky is the Limit" (Sky Limits), a comprehensive technology assessment study on the opportunities and risks of exploiting lower airspace as a new layer of transportation for delivery drones and air taxis in Germany. Mr. Biehle's professional background is in interdisciplinary risk and innovation research as well as in the development of participatory planning procedures in infrastructure and urban development.
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