Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford
Simone D’Amico is Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AA), W.M. Keck Faculty Scholar in the School of Engineering, Associate Professor of Geophysics (by Courtesy), and Science Fellow at Hoover. He is the Founding Director of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory, Founding Co-Director of the Center for AEroSpace Autonomy Research (CAESAR), and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Aerospace Engineering at Stanford. He has 20+ years of experience in research and development of autonomous spacecraft and distributed space systems.
He developed the distributed Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) system of several formation-flying and rendezvous missions and is currently the institutional PI of four autonomous satellite swarms funded by NASA (STARLING, STARI) and by NSF (VISORS, SWARM-EX) with one of them operational in orbit right now (STARLING).
Besides academia, Dr. D’Amico is in the Advisory Board of four space start-ups focusing on distributed space systems for future applications in SAR remote sensing, orbital lifetime prolongation, and space-based solar power.
He was the recipient of several awards, most recently the 2024 NASA Ames Honor Award for the Starling mission, Best Paper Awards at IAF (2022), IEEE (2021), AIAA (2021), AAS (2019) conferences, and the M. Barry Carlton Award by IEEE (2020). He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Politecnico di Milano (2003) and the Ph.D. degree from Delft University of Technology (2010).
