Julie Newman is Program Chief Engineer for Satelit Nusantara Lima N5 (SNL), a major geostationary communications satellite program, at Boeing. In this role, she has been instrumental in overseeing risk management and problem resolution for the satellite, particularly in the midst of a challenging shift to a different payload. Julie regularly directs and approves the work of senior engineering staff and provides recommendations to the program management office and the customer. She has also represented her executive manager in various critical functions, ranging from safety to quality assurance across Boeing’s El Segundo site and has spearheaded multiple process improvement initiatives, including major efforts to improve Boeing’s engineering training and metrics tracking systems. Before taking on her current position, Julie was the Technical Program Manager, a role in which she led a team of 15 engineers to develop the engine controller assembly for the Space Launch System (SLS) first stage rocket. The team consistently exceeded expectations under her leadership while executing a late re-design of the unit to resolve a leakage issue associated with a sneak path discovered during testing of the engineering model. She received a Promise Award from SSPI in 2023. Read more about Julie.
 

Dr. Zhe Liu is Senior Materials & Process Engineer at Maxar as well as an accomplished scientist with a broad range of expertise in material science, biopolymers and computer science. Originally from China, Dr. Liu began her academic journey with an undergraduate degree in her home country. She then spent several years engaged in research and development in biopolymers before moving to the U.S. for further studies. She earned a Master’s degree in Material Science with a concentration in composite materials from the University of Dayton before pursuing a PhD at Florida State University, where her research focused on nano composite materials for thermal ablative applications. During her PhD, Dr. Liu joined a California-based start-up company that specialized in the novel 3D printing of continuous fiber carbon composites. As team leader, she characterized the materials and developed the process for printing structural components. This crucial work paved the way for the successful commercialization of a carbon fiber/thermoplastic composite bicycle. Dr. Liu is currently working on a second Master’s degree in Computer Science at Georgia Tech while working full-time for Maxar. Read more about Dr. Liu.
 
 

Alix Rousselière is Strategy Consultant for Satcom at Euroconsult, which she joined in April 2022. Her role responsibilities include advising satellite operators and space agencies, conducting commercial and financial assessments and developing market intelligence reports on a variety of topics, including milsatcom and NGSO constellations. Although not an engineer herself, Alix has completed exemplary work on highly technical technology harmonization dossiers for the European Space Agency (ESA), demonstrating her ability to learn and adapt quickly. She participated in more than 12 international consulting missions within her first year at Euroconsult. Before joining Euroconsult, Alix spent two years at Thales in Abu Dhabi where she worked on Strategy and Commercial Development for Defense & Space Key Accounts. In particular, Alix formulated and helped implement a new, transversal, coordinated 5-year Strategic Plan for the company’s UAE Defense accounts by analyzing trends and providing recommendations to C-level executive management on priority subjects and associated investments. Read more about Alix.

Srikanth Kodeboyina is the Founder and CEO of Blue Eye Soft Corp, currently in the process of becoming Blue Space. He moved to the United States in 2010 to pursue his education and earned his Master’s degree in Computer and Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton. Within six years of completing his degree, he was working for Fortune 100 companies and managing projects across 14 states with budgets up to $32 million. Srikanth moved on to be commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, which led to him becoming a U.S. citizen. With citizenship came the opportunity to pursue his true dream, starting his own enterprise in the form of Blue Eye Soft (BES). The company initially offered IT consulting and management services, but it quickly expanded to include BlueDoc AI, Blue Space and Blue Space International, creating a specialty in the application of artificial intelligence models to analyze vast amounts of data, text and imagery. BES has established offices in South Carolina and New Mexico and intends to establish a presence in an international business hub in India next. The company has achieved the highest security clearances and been awarded contracts from agencies such as NASA and AFWERX, a technology directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Since founding BES, Srikanth has been chosen by more than 20 organizations to participate in incubator/accelerator programs for top entrepreneurs. He was a member of the first cohort of the New Mexico Lab-Embedded Entrepreneur Program (LEEP) at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was also chosen to be part of MIT’s Engine program that helps the next generation of “Tough Tech” leaders navigate the commercialization process. Read more about Srikanth.

Klaus Okkelberg is an Electrical Design & Analysis Engineer at Boeing. In his current position, he works at Boeing Phantom Works Space on moving ground-based signal processing algorithms to space, reducing turnaround time, which is crucial for enabling autonomous operations. Klaus also works with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), specifically deep neural networks (DNNs), for image-based inspection and pose estimation – the detection of the position and orientation – of unknown satellites. Supervised AI/ML greatly reduces the need for feature engineering, meaning fewer engineers and revisions are needed per project. Using DNN algorithms has sped up development of new image processing functions and reduces the cost of developing and deploying new space-based imaging sensors, which has led to many new business opportunities for Boeing with national space government customers. Klaus has personally developed several key innovations in AI/ML, including data augmentations, training regularizations and high-dimensional space embeddings. These developments greatly reduce generalization error and enable the use of real satellite imagery from different sources without additional pre- or post-processing. Klaus is a graduate of Penn State Schreyer Honors College with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and of the University of New Orleans with a Master’s degree in the same field. At Penn State, his thesis on nonlinear control of marginal oscillators contributed to the more precise detection of explosive materials, providing immense benefit to potential customers such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Klaus interned at Xilinx in their signal integrity division. Read more about Klaus.