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Silicon Valley Comic Con 2016 Schedule :: Ariel Waldman




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Ariel Waldman

Ariel Waldman makes “massively multiplayer science”, instigating unusual collaborations that spark clever creations for science and space exploration.

Ariel is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the global director of Science Hack Day, a 20-countries-and-growing grassroots endeavor to make things with science. She is the author of What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There (Chronicle Books, 2016). Ariel is also the co-author of a congressionally-requested National Academy of Sciences study on the future of human spaceflight. She sits on the council for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), a program that nurtures radical, sci-fi-esque ideas that could transform future space missions. In 2013, Ariel received an honor from the White House for being a Champion of Change in citizen science.

In 2015, she launched Spaceprob.es, a catalog of the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy. Previously, Ariel worked at NASA’s CoLab program whose mission was to connect communities inside and outside NASA to collaborate. Although her home base is in San Francisco, Ariel loves to travel across the globe 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 (OSCON), as well as appeared on the SyFy channel as part of their Let’s Imagine Greater campaign. Her work with Science Hack Day has taken her to Colombia, China, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Russia and South Africa to help grow budding science enthusiast communities.

Ariel originally grew up in Kansas where she worked at the interactive ad agency VML as a digital anthropologist and attended art school at the Kansas City Art Institute. Never having anticipated that she would one day stumble into a gig at NASA, her mission is now to enlighten others on how anyone can actively contribute to the furthering of science and space exploration in clever new ways.

1:00 pm

Science of Science Fiction :: Room 5
Kishore Hari, Terry Johnson, Kyle Kurpinski, Mary Poffenroth, Ariel Waldman
Sunday March 20, 2016 :: 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
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