Space Tech Symposium @ Berkeley 2019 is a gathering of space tech pioneers in industry and research. Top startups executives, scientists, and engineers will present their visions of the future of space tech and much more. Attendees will be able to interact with presenters as well as with fellow industry professionals attending the event. We’ll be holding 3 main speaker panels on Robotics in Space, Biology in Space, and Earth-Space Services, as well as a keynote presentation.
DATE 6 May 2019
LOCATION Sibley Auditorium, Berkeley, CA
SPEAKERS Over 10 Professional Speakers
We are bringing you the perfect combination of content and experience to ignite your
heart, equip your mind, and spark your space journey.
We are very excited about the talks we have planned for you.
Only at Space Tech Symposium 2018 this spring in Berkeley, California.
Learn what Space Technologies at Cal (STAC) is about, who we are, and what we do.
Speaker : To Be AnnouncedHear from a panel of researchers and professors to learn more about robotics in space.
Moderator : To Be Announced Panelist : Terry Fong - NASA Ames Panelist : Alice Agogino - UC BerkeleyHear from a panel of researchers to learn more about the exciting biological research happening in the space community.
Moderator : To Be Announced Panelist : Rachel Clemens - CASIS Panelist : Tony Ricco - NASA Ames Panelist : John Cumbers - SynBioBeta Panelist : Daniel Garalde - Oxford Nanopore Technologies Panelist : Lynn Rothschild - NASA AmesHear from a panel of private space companies to learn more about the innovations in the space industry.
Moderator : To Be Announced Panelist : Nick Allain - Spire Global Panelist : Rachel Olney - GeoSite Panelist : Sara Spangelo - Swarm TechnologiesTalk to the STAC members and industry partners to learn about the projects they have been working on over the past year at their project exhibition. Food provided.
Reserve your ticket right now for the talk of the year
Join us to hear from some of space technology's brightest minds.
Interested in sponsoring? Feel free to get in touch with us at events@stac.berkeley.edu
We are very excited to show you what we have planned for you. Please join us at UC Berkeley on Monday, May 6, 2019. We look forward to meeting you there.
Sibley Auditorium
Bechtel Engineering Center
Berkeley, CA 94709 USA
Email : events@stac.berkeley.edu
Some frequently asked questions for you.
Space Tech Symposium at Berkeley (STS@Berkeley) is a gathering of space tech pioneers in industry and research. Top venture capitalists, startups, scientists, and engineers will present their visions for the future of space tech and much more. STS attendees will also be able to interact with presenters and fellow industry professionals.
We are a group of passionate scientists who want to push the frontier of space research and the space industry. We are not a typical engineering club; we focus on making strides in innovating space technologies. We, like the rest of industry, want to accelerate our progression towards the exploration and habitation of space. Berkeley, the crossroads of a world class research university and a burgeoning space startup scene, is the the perfect spot for a conversation about the collaboration of the public and private sectors necessary for the progress in the space industry to take place. We hope that by hosting STS, we can provide attendees a broader perspective of the future of space technology that brings us all a little bit closer to understanding the great unknown.
The Space Tech Symposium will be held in Sibley Auditorium of the Bechtel Engineering Center at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, CA on Monday May 6, 2019 from 4:30pm to 8:30pm.
Space Technologies at Cal (STAC) is a student engineering organization of 60 students at Berkeley focused on developing innovative space technologies and research. We are creating a collaborative space program by incorporating multiple universities, research labs and industry partners to enable space research projects such as High Altitude Balloons, Microgravity Experiments, CubeSats, and more. You can learn more about us at our website.
We are working on many exciting projects. We have a High Altitude Balloon project, where we launch unmanned helium balloon into near space with scientific payloads. We are launching several Interstellar Microgravity Experiments (TIMEs) to outer-space with Blue Origin rockets, where we further aerospace research by testing how a low-gravity environment - like space - will affect lifeforms, optics, and physical mechanics. Our CubeSat Deployer project aims to deploy smaller swarm of Wafer Scale Spacecrafts (WaferSats) into space to pioneer the work in laser communication. Lastly but not the least, our Autonomous Rover project is working on developing a resource rover, in collaboration with NASA Ames, that is fully controllable and autonomous in order to extract and utilize resources on moon.
There are many great ideas that people just assume are being worked on, but this may not be the case. We cannot just assume these ideas are being worked on. Some one has to work on small incremental steps that get us one step closer to these long term goals: that is exactly what STAC is trying to do. We work on projects that get humanity one step closer to long term space innovations.
Yes! Your support ensures that we can continue innovating and breaking through new barriers in space. You can learn more about our sponsorship on our website. If you are interested in shaping the coming age of space exploration along our side with a sponsorship or donation, please contact us at execs@stac.berkeley.edu.
Yes: comfortable. Keep in mind the amazing people you’ll be meeting at this conference, and dress to impress and connect with them. However you style yourself, make sure it’s respectful of the beautiful venue and other guests attending the event.
Definitely! Anyone passionate about space is welcome and encouraged to attend our Symposium! Don't forget to grab your tickets in advance!
Yes! Student tickets cost only $12.
Terry Fong is NASA's Senior Scientist for Autonomous Systems and the Chief Roboticist at the NASA Ames Research Center. Terry previously was the project manager for the NASA Human Exploration Telerobotics project, which develops and tests advanced remotely-operated systems on the International Space Station (ISS). Terry's latest robot, Astrobee, was launched to the ISS in April. Terry received his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She currently serves as Chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering and Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. She directs research in the BEST (Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities) Lab and the Product Design MEng program. She is also co-founder and CEO of Squishy Robotics, developer of rapidly deployable sensor robots for disaster response, monitoring and space exploration. Agogino has authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and has won numerous teaching, mentoring, best paper and research awards.
Alexander Harmsen is CEO and Co-Founder of Iris Automation, a high tech start-up building computer vision collision avoidance systems for industrial drones. With backing from Bessemer, Y Combinator, over $10M in private equity investment from other Silicon Valley investors, and operations in multiple countries, Iris Automation is attempting to radically disrupt the industrial drone sector. He also sits on the Board of Directors for Unmanned Systems Canada, a national industry representation organization that has been at the forefront of commercial unmanned systems for more than a decade.
Previously, Alexander was the first Software Developer at Matternet, a medical drone package delivery start-up, and worked on computer vision systems at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Los Angeles. He is very interested in intersections between drones, autonomous vehicles and real-world applications that will affect billions of people, always excited about meeting other people making big changes in the world!
Rachel Clemens has focused her career on advancing life science research and product development through experiments in space. Rachel obtained a PhD in molecular biology at OHSU and then worked as a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. In her current role as a Commercial Innovation Manager at the ISS US National Lab, she brings life science research to low earth orbit. She is eager to entertain even the craziest of ideas and passionate about finding new solutions to Earth-bound problems.
Tony Ricco is the Chief Technologist for Small Payloads at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. He received BS and PhD degrees in chemistry from UC Berkeley and MIT, respectively. Tony’s professional experience includes development of chemical microsensors and microsystems, polymer microfluidic systems for biotech. applications, point-of-care medical diagnostic devices, and autonomous bioanalytical systems for biological space studies and the search for life on the icy worlds of our solar system.
Nick shaped Spire’s global brand presence for more than 6 years and brought press to New Space in nearly every major outlet. He was an early member of Spire’s team, dating back to when the company was still in its San Francisco incubator. Previous to his work in New Space, he worked at Brown University where he lead the ivy’s live streaming program which hosted talks from luminaries including the Dalai Lama and Gloria Steinem.
Rachel Olney is a Stanford University Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate and the Founder and CEO of Geosite Inc. She has taught innovation frameworks and built standard operating procedures for the most elite special operations. She has also helped create and scale an international program in national security innovation and conducted research for the US Air Force on the Strategic Implications of Ultra Low-Cost Access to Space. As the CEO of Geosite she leads a Venture Capital backed Silicon Valley startup disrupting the geospatial data industry, making it easier for logistically intensive industries, such as Oil and Gas and the Department of Defense and Intelligence Communities, to easily leverage spatial data to increase operational efficiency.
Sara Spangelo completed a Master’s and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, and worked on CubeSat and UAV missions. She worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) as a lead systems engineer for small satellite to Discovery-class mission concepts. She worked at Google X, leading safety for Project Wing and proposing/ leading a project in the Rapid Evaluation group. She made it to the top 32 candidates in the 2017 Canadian astronaut recruitment campaign. She is currently the CEO and Co-founder of Swarm Technologies.
John Cumbers is the founder and CEO of SynBioBeta, a global innovation network and community of entrepreneurs, thought-leaders and investors. He is the co-author of "What's Your Bio Strategy?" a book on the impact that synthetic biology is having on all business. John has been consulting to leading companies and investors on the impact of synthetic biology for over a decade. He has received multiple awards and grants from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences for his work in the field.
Daniel Garalde used nanopores to study single-molecule functional complexes of DNA polymerases in one of the pioneering nanopore research groups at University of California Santa Cruz where he did a Ph.D in computer engineering. Daniel consulted Oxford nanopore on strand-sequencing technology in 2010 and joined Oxford Nanopore full-time in 2011. He has driven forward-looking research projects including cDNA and Direct RNA sequencing, drawing on his experience with electrical engineering, biochemistry and nanopores. Daniel is currently supporting customer projects and research collaborators in California from Oxford Nanopore’s new San Francisco office.
Lynn Rothschild is passionate about the origin and evolution of life on Earth or elsewhere, while at the same time pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration. She wears several hats as a senior scientist NASA’s Ames Research Center and Bio and Bio-Inspired Technologies, Research and Technology Lead for NASA Headquarters Space Technology Mission Directorate, as well as Adjunct Professor at Brown University. Her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere. More recently Rothschild has brought her creativity to the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, articulating a vision for the future of synthetic biology as an enabling technology for NASA’s missions, including human space exploration and astrobiology. Since 2011 she has been the faculty advisor of the award-winning Stanford-Brown iGEM team, which has pioneered the use of synthetic biology to accomplish NASA’s missions, particularly focusing on the human settlement of Mars, astrobiology and such innovative technologies as BioWires and making a biodegradable UAS (drone) and a bioballoon. Her lab is testing these plans in space on in the PowerCell synthetic biology secondary payload on a DLR satellite, EuCROPIS, launched in December 2018. She is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club. In 2015, she was awarded the Isaac Asimov Award from the American Humanist Association, and was the recipient of the Horace Mann Award from Brown University, and has been a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellow three times, most recently in 2018. She frequently appears on documentaries, TV and radio, and lectures worldwide.