Leon Alkalai is a retired Technical Fellow of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology where he spent 32 years after getting his PhD at UCLA in 1989. During his career at JPL, Dr. Alkalai held numerous leadership positions and was responsible for the capture leadership of both the GRAIL mission to the Moon (2007) and the INSIGHT lander on Mars (2012). For both efforts, Dr. Leon Alkalai received Distinguished Individual Achievement medals from NASA in 2011 and 2019 respectively. Dr. Alkalai was also heading up JPL strategic partnerships and strategic planning for the Laboratory. In early 2021, Dr. Alkalai retired from JPL and created Mandala Space Ventures, a space-focused, Pasadena-based incubator for new start-ups in the emerging space economy. Leon is also the General Partner at the Explorer-1 Venture Fund which is also affiliated with the Mandala space incubator. Mandala launched its first new venture called Continuum Space Systems, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company for the emerging digital space economy. Mandala has two other portfolio companies in the studio; Viridian Space Corporation and Specter Aerospace. Mandala has also recently launched Sophia Space Inc., which is developing data centers in space.
Bethany Ehlmann is a professor of planetary science at Caltech and Director of Caltech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies. Her research focuses on water in the solar system, the evolution of habitable worlds, and remote sensing techniques and instruments for planetary missions. She is Principal Investigator of Lunar Trailblazer, a NASA smallsat mission launching in 2025 with a goal to map the form, distribution, and abundance of water on the Moon and understand the lunar water cycle. She is a member of the science teams for the earth-orbiting EMIT hyperspectral imager, Europa Clipper, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, and the Mars-2020 Perseverance rover. Previously, she was a member of the science teams for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CRISM instrument, the Dawn mission at Ceres, and the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Active in science policy and outreach, Prof. Ehlmann served on the steering committee of the National Academies Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey, is President of the Board of Directors of the Planetary Society, and authored a children's book on solar system exploration with National Geographic. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and Mineralogical Society of America.
Dr. Cynthia Phillips is a planetary geologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. She currently works on the Europa Clipper mission, where she serves as a Project Staff Scientist among other roles, in addition to being Project Scientist on a New Frontiers mission concept proposal. Dr. Phillips received her undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Harvard, and her PhD in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona. She spent 15 years at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center before joining JPL in 2015. Dr. Phillips is an expert in scientific image processing and small-scale surface processes on planetary satellites, with a particular focus on Europa, Io, and Enceladus.
