Moriba Jah

Change Agent, Concerned citizen, Connector, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Parent, Public servant, Scientist, World traveler

Moriba Jah, holder of the Mrs. Pearlie Dashiell Henderson Centennial Fellowship in Engineering, is the director for Computational Astronautical Sciences and Technologies (CAST), a group within the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Lead for the Space Security and Safety Program at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Moriba came to UT Austin by way of the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory prior to that, where he was a Spacecraft Navigator on a handful of Mars missions. Moriba is a Fellow of multiple organizations: TED, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Astronautical Society (AAS), International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). He has served on the US delegation to the United Nations Committee On Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN-COPUOS), is an elected Academician of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and has testified to congress on his work as related to Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management. He’s an Associate Editor of the Elsevier Advances in Space Research journal, and serves on multiple committees: IAA Space Debris, AIAA Astrodynamics, IAF Astrodynamics, and IAF Space Security.

Space Environmentalism

Making space safe, secure, and sustainable through transparency and predictability empowered by citizen science

Astrodynamics, Data Analytics, Data Science, Multi-Source Information Fusion, Orbit Determination and Prediction, Space Situational Awareness, Space Surveillance

I’ve done a couple of TEDx talks but the big kahuna was definitely applying to the TED Fellows program at the suggestion of TED Fellow Sarah Jane Pell, and ending up being selected to the 10th Anniversary TED Fellow class. I felt that the initiation into this lifelong fellowship happened as each of the newly minted TED Fellows gave our TED talks in Vancouver on April 15th, 2019. It is the very first time in my career that I join a group of people whose Modus Operandi is to actually get real things done that have measurable positive impact on Earth and her humanity. My TED story is just beginning...and I am looking forward to this journey!