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.
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.
