Dava Newman is director of the MIT Media Lab. She’s also the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT, and a Harvard-MIT Health, Sciences, and Technology faculty member. She served as deputy administrator of NASA from 2015 to 2017, the first female engineer in this role, and was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

Her research and teaching expertise include aerospace biomedical engineering, astronaut performance, advanced spacesuit design, leadership development, innovation and space policy. Dava has been principal investigator on four spaceflight missions aboard the Space Shuttle, Russian Mir Space Station and the International Space Station, and is best known for her revolutionary BioSuit™ planetary spacesuit.

Recently, she co-founded EarthDNA with partner Guillermo Trotti, a global platform for climate advocacy and action that aims to accelerate solutions for earth’s ocean, land and air subsystems by curating near-space satellite data.