Douglas Hope

Douglas Hope is a physicist and senior scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and part of the research faculty at Georgia Tech in the School of Physics. As a former NASA/JPL Fellow, he has spent his career using the world's largest telescopes — from Hawaii's summit observatories to the James Webb Space Telescope — to reveal what hides in the faint light of distant objects. He was part of the NASA team that discovered a hidden companion around the star Betelgeuse. As a member of Georgia Tech's Space Research Institute, Hope teaches the next generation of space scientists about space domain awareness (SDA) — and hopefully some of you in our audience today will be among them! 

Alexander Miranda

Alexander W. Miranda is a Senior Research Scientist with the Space Research Institute and the Center for Cyber Operations Enquiry and Unconventional Sensing (COEUS) at Georgia Tech, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where his research and teaching span cybersecurity for critical Infrastructure and Space Systems, Technology Risk Management, Space Domain Awareness, and the Security of National Defense Systems. Miranda has worked on the U.S. Navy's Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), a next-generation satellite constellation providing secure communications to the warfighters. Miranda continues to serve in the US NAVY Reserve and has designations as a Cryptologic Warfare Officer and Space Maritime Officer, providing operational support across intelligence operations, satellite systems, and space cadre missions, bridging rigorous academic inquiry with real-world national security imperatives across the cyber, space, and intelligence domains.