A Space Station Orbiting the Moon: The Gateway to Mars and Beyond

Dr. Jamil A. Shariff hails from Edmonton, Alberta originally. He has a Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from UBC, and a PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics, which he completed at the University of Toronto in 2015. As part of his PhD thesis, he lived and worked in Antarctica for three months in 2014-2015. There, as part of an international team of scientists, he helped design, assemble, test, and launch an experiment called Spider on a high-altitude helium balloon into the stratosphere. Spider was a set of state-of-the art telescopes designed to shed light on what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang.

Throughout Dr. Shariff's career, his interests have lain at the intersection of science and technology: how new developments in hardware, instrumentation, and algorithms enable new discoveries about the natural world. Dr. Shariff joined the team at MDA, Canada's premier space technology company, in 2019.