Ariel Waldman makes “massively multiplayer science,” instigating unusual collaborations that spark clever creations for science and space exploration.
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Ariel is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the global director of Science Hack Day, a 20-countries-and-growing grassroots endeavor to make things with science. She is the author of What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There and the co-author of a congressionally-requested National Academy of Sciences study on the future of human spaceflight. She sits on the council for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), a program that nurtures radical, sci-fi-esque ideas that could transform future space missions. She is also a fellow at Institute for the Future.
 
In 2013, Ariel received an honor from the White House for being a Champion of Change in citizen science. For her work on Science Hack Day, Ariel has been awarded grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. In 2012, she authored a white paper on Democratized Science Instrumentation that was presented to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In 2015, she launched Spaceprob.es, a catalog of the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy. Previously, Ariel worked at NASA’s CoLab program whose mission was to connect communities inside and outside NASA to collaborate.