Speakers
Mike Massimino, NASA Astronaut, Author
Mike Massimino, a former NASA astronaut, is a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and the senior advisor for space programs at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Mike has made numerous television appearances and movie cameos, including a recurring role as himself on the CBS comedy, The Big Bang Theory. He has been featured in National Geographic Television's One Strange Rock and in the Netflix Series Worn Stories. He is a frequent guest on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Daily Show.
Massimino's Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe is a New York Times best-seller. His new book, Moonshot: A NASA Astronaut's Guide to Achieving the Impossible, distills stories and insight from NASA into an actionable guide to accomplish your biggest goals. "We all have our own personal 'moon shots' we'd like to take in life, but as mission control will tell you, doing one big thing really means getting a thousand little things right along the way," says Mike.
After working as an engineer at IBM, NASA, and McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, along with academic appointments at Rice University and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Mike was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1996, and is the veteran of two space flights, the fourth and fifth Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions in 2002 and 2009. Mike has a team record for the number of hours spacewalking in a single space shuttle mission, and he was also the first person to tweet from space. During his NASA career he received two NASA Space Flight Medals, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the American Astronautical Society's Flight Achievement Award, and the Star of Italian Solidarity.
He received a BS from Columbia University, and MS degrees in mechanical engineering and in technology and policy, as well as a PhD in mechanical engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.