Ariel Ekblaw
Dr. Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute, where she strives to bring humanity’s space exploration future to life. Through architecture R&D, education and outreach, and policy thought leadership, she is building a remarkable team and a novel FRO (Focused Research Organization) to expand humanity’s horizons and scale life in space. At CCAM, Ariel co-teaches the Mechanical Artifact Ultra Space class at the Yale School of Architecture with CCAM Director, Dana Karwas. Ariel helps drive research and strategy for the CCAM Ultra Space Research Project.
Aurelia Institute is spun out of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (SEI)—a team of over 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty actively prototyping the artifacts of our sci-fi space future—of which Ariel is also the founder and Director. Ariel drives SEI’s space-related research across science, engineering, art, and design, and leads an annually recurring cadence of parabolic flights, sub-orbital launches, and missions to the International Space Station.
Ariel is the author/editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT Press 2021). She serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee, guiding and shaping the coming decade of burgeoning activity on the moon. Ariel has had the rare honor and pleasure of working directly on space hardware that now operates on the surface of Mars and is leading MIT’s To the Moon To Stay mission.
Ariel graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University and designed a novel space architecture habitat for her MIT PhD in autonomously self-assembling space structures. Her research work and the lab she leads builds towards future habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Ariel and her work have been featured in WIRED, MIT Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, NPR, PRI’s Science Friday, IEEE and AIAA proceedings, and more.
Equally comfortable in a boardroom, a machine shop, or free-floating in the middle of a zero-gravity parabola, Ariel drives innovation, entrepreneurship, and research at the forefront of space exploration. As the daughter of two US Air Force Pilots, Ariel developed a deep commitment to the service model of leadership at a young age, and followed in her mother’s glass-ceiling breaking footsteps (Maj. Ekblaw was one of the country’s first female instructor pilots). With a deep family history of extreme environment exploration, including the Ekblaw Glacier in the Arctic and Mt. Ekblaw in Antarctica named after her great-grandfather, Ariel looks forward to galvanizing exploration at the vanguard of humanity’s horizons—from Low Earth Orbit to other celestial bodies.