Summit Organizers
Eliah G. Overbey, PhD
Summit Founder and Executive Director
Eliah G. Overbey is a Founding Faculty member and Assistant Professor of Bioastronautics at the University of Austin (UATX), where she leads research on the biological impacts of spaceflight. She was a primary architect of the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) and is a key figure in analyzing mission data from the Inspiration4 mission. Her work focuses on building the critical biological infrastructure necessary for sustained human life and expansion across the solar system.
Christopher E. Mason, PhD
Director of On-Site Astronaut Bioscience
Christopher Mason is a Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine and a leading architect of the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA). He is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds and has served as a principal investigator for numerous NASA missions, including the landmark Twins Study. His research focuses on the genetic foundations and molecular mapping necessary for long-term human resilience and expansion across the solar system.
Alex Petkas, PhD
Director of Partnerships and External Development
Alex Petkas is a classicist and host of the Cost of Glory podcast. He is the CEO and co-founder of The Classical Society, an organization reviving classical statesmanship and philosophy for modern tech and business leaders. He speaks regularly on classical futurism and the Western tradition of statesmanship.
Lauren Sanders, PhD
Director of the Biosovereignty Hackathon
Lauren Sanders is a Research Scientist Affiliate at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, where she co-leads the NASA Citizen Science AI/ML Analysis Working Group, in which teams deploy AI and machine learning to decode and mitigate the molecular impacts of spaceflight. She is the former Project Scientist for the Open Science Data Repository at NASA Ames Research Center, and co-founded the Artificial Intelligence for Life in Space (AI4LS) initiative. She holds a PhD in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering and is currently employed as a Senior Scientist in Computational Biology at Colossal Biosciences.