Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the global instigator of Science Hack Day, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend. She is also an interaction designer, a research affiliate at Institute For The Future, and an advisor for the SETI Institute‘s radio show, Big Picture Science. Previously, she worked at NASA’s CoLab program whose mission was to connect communities inside and outside NASA to collaborate. Ariel has also been a sci-fi movie gadget columnist for Engadget and a digital anthropologist at VML. In 2008, she was named one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley.

Recently, Ariel was appointed as a National Academy of Sciences committee member of a congressionally-requested study on the future of human spaceflight. The Committee on Human Spaceflight has been tasked with a study to review the long-term goals, core capabilities, and direction of the U.S. human spaceflight program and make recommendations to enable a sustainable U.S. human spaceflight program. In 2012, she authored a white paper on Democratized Science Instrumentation that was presented to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Ariel has been awarded two grants for her work on Science Hack Day from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Although her home base is in San Francisco, she loves to travel across the globe frequently to speak to a variety of audiences and work on fun projects. She has keynoted DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Symposium and O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, as well as appeared on the SyFy channel as part of their Let’s Imagine Greater campaign.

“Hacking Space Exploration” keynote at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention: