Brian Falzon holds the title of Distinguished Professor and is the Director of the Space Industry Hub at RMIT University. He was previously the Head of School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast, in the UK, and was appointed to the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering – Bombardier Chair in Aerospace Composites in 2013. Between 2008 and 2012 Prof Falzon was the Foundation Chair in Aerospace Engineering at Monash University, where he was also Director of Research, Head of the Aerospace Engineering programmes and Deputy Head of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Between 1996 and 2008, Prof Falzon was at Imperial College London where he joined as a postdoctoral research fellow before becoming an academic staff member. Prof Falzon is internationally renowned for his work on advanced composite materials and structures, and has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal/conference papers and book chapters, one book, and edited three others. He is a Visiting Professor at Queen’s University Belfast, Monash University and the University of New South Wales and was a Visiting Researcher at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Dr James Waldie is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, and the Co-founder of Cape Bionics and Human Aerospace. He has over two decades of experience in bioastronautics, including research appointments at the University of California and MIT. His work has concentrated on skinsuit design for spacewalking and as a physical deconditioning countermeasure for astronauts during long duration spaceflight. He has been a consultant at the NASA Johnson Space Center, and was a Principal Investigator with the European Space Agency (ESA) on his Gravity Loading Skinsuit which was deployed to the Space Station in 2015 and 2017. Dr Waldie is currently leading an international programme to develop new skinsuits under an Australian Space Agency grant at Human Aerospace.

Andreas Antoniades is the Director for Australia at Saber Astronautics. He oversees general business operations and strategy, defence projects, space mission planning, and electronics design at the company. Andreas is an experienced embedded electronics engineer and entrepreneur, focusing on hardware design for space technologies, modelling of systems, manufacturing, compliance, assembly, testing and working with machine intelligence for space and defence applications. Currently, Andreas is also the PI for CUAVA, an ARC-Funded Training Centre for CubeSats, UAVs and their Applications. He is on the advisory board of several successful Australian space companies, and Chairman of OrbitOz. Former space experience has involved the creation and operation of Obelisk Systems, a next-generation CubeSat and STEM education company involved in the delivery of educational payloads to the ISS.

Dr Gail Iles has a PhD in physics from the UK and now works as a physics lecturer at RMIT University. From 2010-2012 Gail trained astronauts at the European Astronaut Centre in Germany. Gail taught astronauts how to operate the Columbus laboratory and respond to emergencies in space. Gail now designs and launches experiments on rockets and is working to establish parabolic flights in Australia. Gail is the founder and manager of the new BSc Space Science at RMIT, Science Correspondent for Neil Mitchell on 3AW, Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics and nominated for ‘Female Space Leader of the Year 2022’.