Dr. Eliad Peretz is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and serves under Nobel Laureate in Physics Dr. John Mather as a Lead Researcher for New Space Missions, where he is charged with identifying and mapping the scientific challenges, required technologies, and designing and leading space missions that could solve some of humanity’s great questions, among them whether other habitable planets around sun-like stars exist in the universe.  Dr Peretz, a technology program manager at Goddard’s instrument systems and Technology Division, is developing new technologies in support of existing and future NASA missions. He also leads GSFC Smallsat development lab, supporting an array of flight projects including technology development effort spanning from future LIDAR systems for Moon and Mars Rovers to X-ray attenuators that will help us better study solar flares on the Sun and its physical creation mechanisms.

For his work, he received NASA’s Early Career Achievement Medal (2020), Goddard Honor Award (2019), and NASA’s Early Career Excellence Award (2018), he is also the recipient of the national science foundation and NASA’s Space Technology Research Awards (2015). He was nominated as an Early Career scientist to the Lindau Nobel Meetings (2019) as well as by the National Academy of Sciences to the Astrophysics Decadal Survey Early Career scientist session (2018) and was named the Co-Chair of the US extremely large telescopes Key Science Program for novel uses (2019). Eliad is currently in the selection process for the Astronaut program.

Eliad Was born in Afula in 1982 to a family of immigrants from Morocco and the United Kingdom, he received his B.Sc degree from the Technion in Aerospace Engineering, M.Sc and Ph.D. at Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics from Cornell University. He currently resides in Silver Spring MD with his wife Abby Goldman who serves at Science and Technology Policy Institute advising the White House among other federal agencies and two daughters Shoshana and Ruth.