Thursday, November 14th, 2019

STEM, Space Industries and Hollywood

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Sesson I: Ahmanson Hall, Live Webcast

Space Educators: From Space Scientists to Creative Visionaries

Marc Zicree, TV, Writer/Producer, Star Trek – The Next Generation, Sliders, Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine

Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, Astrophysicist, Author, Musician and FIU CASE Board Member

Z. Nagin Cox, Tactical Mission Lead : Curiosity Rover Flight Team, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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.

Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, Astrophysicist, Author, Musician and FIU CASE Board Member: Internationally renowned astrophysicist, author and recording artist, Dr. Fiorella Terenzi has a doctorate in physics from the University of Milan. In research at the Computer Audio Research Laboratory, University of California,  San Diego, she pioneered techniques to convert radio waves from distant galaxies into sound - released by Island Records on her acclaimed CD "Music from the  Galaxies". Her award-winning CD-ROM "Invisible Universe” (Voyager Company) and best-selling books  "Heavenly Knowledge", "Musica Dalle Stelle", & "Der Kosmos ist weiblich” (Harper&Collins) weave astronomy and music, science and art into a tapestry for the senses.  She has appeared on CNN and in The Wall Street Journal, People, Time, and Glamour, and lectured at UCSD, Stanford, and MIT. Dr. Terenzi’s ground-breaking video for fashion designer Ermenegildo Zegna's Men's Collection was described by the New York Times as "Zegna's Very Big Bang”, and her high-energy show  “Let’s Get Astrophysical”, performed at the Miami Beach Centennial, featured the first Top-15 Stellar-Themed Song  Countdown combined with live DJs, musicians, dancers, and acrobats. Her FIU CASE "Physics & Ferraris” seminar showcased a variety of exotic Ferrari sports cars along with renowned inventor and former Walt Disney Imagineering R&D President, Bran Ferren to "Entertain, Educate, Enlighten, and Enthrall".  As a recording artist,  she has recorded "Quantum Mechanic" and “N.E.O" tracks for Billboard Top 20 Music Video "The Gate to the Mind's Eye with Thomas Dolby (Giant/Warner Bros. Records); Beyond Life, a Mercury Records dance/trance CD tribute to Dr. Timothy Leary (Polygram Records); "Trance Planet Vol. 5”  ( Triloka Records) and others. Terenzi's global media appearances include television and radio features on The Dennis Miller Show, Sci Fi Channel, NPR Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition and Science Friday, Newsweek on Air, Strange universe, History Channel's "The Universe and "Ancient Aliens and others.

Marc Scott Zicree has written and produced hundreds of hours of series TV, pilots and feature films for most of the major studios and networks, including Paramount, Universal, Disney, Sony/Columbia Tri-Star, MGM, Warners, Castle Rock, New Line, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, WB, UPN, Showtime, PBS, Turner, USA Networks, Syfy, Discovery, Nickelodeon, the BBC, Marvel, Scholastic, ITV and NPR. Among his credits are classic episodes of Star Trek – The Next Generation, Sliders, Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine, Friday the 13th – The Series, Smurfs, Superfriends, He-Man, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Forever Knight, Liberty’s Kids and The Real Ghostbusters, among many others.  Marc’s work has been nominated for the Hugo Award, American Book Award, Humanitas Prize, Nebula Award and Diane Thomas Award, and has won the prestigious Hamptons Prize, TV Guide Award, Rondo and Saturn Awards.  In 2014, Marc was named a Writers Guild Diversity Honoree. Marc’s landmark book The Twilight Zone Companion created the modern genre of books on TV series and inspired a generation of TV showrunners and filmmakers, including J.J Abrams, Brannon Braga, Ron Moore, Mark Fergus and Damon Lindelof.  The Companion was an instant bestseller (over half million copies to date) and named by the New York Times one of “ten science fiction books for the ages,” the only non-fiction book on the list.  He has just completed the extensively updated new edition, released this year by Silman-James.  Silman-James will also be publishing his new book Greenlighting Yourself in 2019. Also among Marc’s recent books is GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES, co-written with Guillermo del Toro for HarperCollins, which debuted as the number one movie book on Amazon.  In addition, Marc is a lauded novelist with the bestselling Magic Time trilogy, published by HarperCollins and Blackstone Audio.  The Magic Time audio play, starring Christina Moses and Armin Shimerman, has just been released by Skyboat Media, in association with Blackstone Audio. Marc and his wife and writing-producing-directing partner Elaine have just founded Space Command Studios, a production company based in Los Angeles, London and Wales, dedicated to making TV series and films that are socially relevant and inspiring.  Among many projects currently in prep, production or post, they are writing, directing and producing Space Command, an epic science fiction series starring Doug Jones (Star Trek Discovery, The Shape of Water), Mike Harney (Orange is the New Black), John Hennigan (Glow), Christina Moses (The Originals, A Million Little Things), Faran Tahir (J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, Iron Man, American Crime), Mira Furlan (Lost, Babylon 5), James Hong (Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China), Bill Mumy (Lost In Space, Babylon 5), Robert Picardo (Star Trek Voyager, Stargate Atlantis, The Orville), Armin Shimerman (Deep Space Nine, Buffy) and Bruce Boxleitner (Babylon 5, Tron). They are in post on the two-hour pilot Space Command: Redemption and have shot forty minutes of the second two-hour story Space Command: Forgiveness at their studio in Los Angeles.

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.