Thursday, November 14th, 2019

STEM, Space Industries and Hollywood

11:45 AM - 12:45 PM
Sesson I: Ahmanson Hall, Live Webcast

Our Space Future: A Five-Year Moon and Mars Strategy and the K-12 Space Education Adventure

Z. Nagin Cox, Tactical Mission Lead : Curiosity Rover Flight Team, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Ben Dickow, President and Executive Director, Columbia Memorial Space Center

Rod Pyle, Author, Journalist, and Editor-In-Chief, Ad Astra magazine, National Space Society

Marty Perlmutter, President, Multisensory Interactive Learning Institute (MILI), Moderator

Nagin Cox has been exploring since she decided as a teenager that she wanted to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She was born in Bangalore, India, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her experiences as a child in a Muslim household showed her how easily we separate ourselves based on gender, race or nationality, and it inspired her to do something that brings people together instead of dividing them. The Space Program helps the world "look up" and remember that we are one world. Thus, she has known from the time she was 14 years old that she wanted to work on missions of robotic space exploration. Cox realized her childhood dream and has been a spacecraft operations engineer at NASA/JPL for over 20 years. She has held leadership and system engineering positions on interplanetary robotic

missions including the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Kepler exoplanet hunter, InSight and the Mars Curiosity Rover. In 2015, Cox was honored as the namesake for Asteroid 14061 by its discovers. She has also received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and two NASA Exceptional Achievement Medals. She is a U.S. Department of State STEM Speaker and has spoken to audiences around the world on the stories of the people behind the missions. She has also served on Cornell University’s President's Council for Cornell Women. Before her time at JPL, Cox served for 6 years in the US Air Force including duty as a Space Operations Officer at NORAD/US Space Command. She holds engineering degrees from Cornell University and the Air Force Institute of Technology as well as a psychology degree from Cornell. (Sometimes she is not sure which one she uses more: the engineering degree or the psychology degree.) Cox is currently a Tactical Mission Lead on the Curiosity Rover, and every day at NASA/JPL exploring space is as rewarding as the first. You can contact her at nagincox(at)outlook.com.

Rod Pyle is a space author, journalist and historian who has authored 17 books on space history, exploration and development for major publishers and NASA that have been released in ten languages. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the National Space Society’s quarterly print magazine Ad Astra, and his frequent articles have appeared in Space.com, LiveScience, Futurity, Huffington Post, Popular Science, Caltech’s E&S magazine, and WIRED. He has written extensively for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, including Technology Highlights for NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Rod co-authored and lectured for the Apollo Executive Leadership Program for NASA’s Johnson Space Center and The Conference Board.  New book releases for 2019 include Space 2.0 (with a foreword by Buzz Aldrin), Interplanetary Robots, Heroes of the Space Age, and First on the Moon (also with a foreword by Aldrin), which is currently in its fifth printing. Rod’s previous Apollo books Missions to the Moon (foreword by Gene Kranz) and Destination Moon are being republished for 2019. Rod has also produced or consulted on a number of space documentaries for The History Channel, Discovery Communications and National Geographic. He also worked in visual effects on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the Battlestar Galactica reboot, as well as sci-fi TV pilots. Rod is currently a consultant on the NatGeo documentary on Tom Wolfe's iconic book The Right Stuff. Rod appears on national radio and television, with regular slots on KFI/Los Angeles, and WGN/Chicago (both market leaders), as well as popular podcasts and radio in numerous other markets. Rod hosts a podcast called Cool Space News on iHeart Radio, and appears on PBS’s Between the Lines and C-SPAN’s Book TV regularly. He holds an MA from Stanford University and a BFA from the Art Center College of Design, and lives in Alhambra, California.

Marty Perlmutter, President, Multisensory Interactive Learning Institute (MILI): Marty Perlmutter is currently working on the campaign to save Africa’s elephants, using social media and Virtual Reality to create programming and consciousness to reduce demand for ivory in China. Marty’s education nonprofit, Multisensory Interactive Learning, is developing mobile math games. The first in the series, “Tangram Jam,” is available for Apple and Android devices. He has worked in interactive media for over four decades. He invented an immersive display helmet in 1970 and later incorporated 3D TV in a series of science museum exhibits. He created interactive products for IBM, AT&T, HP, Pioneer, Mindscape, AOL, Looksmart and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His interactive and education work has won awards in the US, Japan and Europe. Perlmutter built long-lasting interactive exhibits at the Boston Museum of Science, Lawrence Hall of Science and New York Hall of Science. He has consulted to HBO, Sony, Xerox, AT&T, MIT, Harvard, NYU, UC, Ericsson, BT and Mass General Hospital. He has lectured at Harvard and MIT and taught at Tufts, NYU, San Francisco State and Cogswell College. His writings on new media have been widely published.