Mike Heiges received the Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering, in 1989. He is currently a Principal Research Engineer with the Georgia Tech Research Institute, where he works as the Associate Division Chief of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Division. His background is in aircraft flight dynamics and automatic control and he manages several of GTRI’s swarming UAV programs. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a member of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI).

My primary interest is floating ice systems - Jupiter's moon Europa and Earth's ice shelves. I am interested in how these environments work and how they may become habitable. I have chosen to focus on Europa because of its potential to have what other places may not have: a stable source of energy from tides that can power geological cycles over the lifetime of the solar system. At its most basic form, life is like a battery, depending upon redox reactions to move electrons.

Dr. Gunter is an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rice University, and later his M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in orbital mechanics. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Gunter was on the faculty of the Delft University of Technology (TU-Delft) in the Netherlands, as a member of the Physical and Space Geodesy section.