Olivier de Weck

Olivier de Weck is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned degrees in Industrial Engineering from ETH Zurich and Aerospace Systems from MIT (SM ’99, PhD ’01) where he is the director of the Engineering Systems Laboratory (http://systems.mit.edu). His main research is in Systems Engineering with a focus on how complex technological systems, such as satellites and launch vehicles, are designed and optimized and how they evolve over time. Methodological contributions that his group has made include Time-expanded Decision Networks (U.S. patent 8,260,652), Generalized Multi-Commodity Network Flows (GMCNF), as well as software tools such as SpaceNet and HabNet. He is a Fellow of INCOSE and a Fellow of AIAA and a former chair of its Space Logistics Technical Committee. He helped develop the first integrated model of the Next Generation Space Telescope (now JWST) and the concept of interplanetary supply chains. He has authored or co-authored over 400 publications for which he has been recognized with twelve best paper awards since 2004. Prof. de Weck previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Systems Engineering from 2013-2018 and is a former Senior Vice President of Technology Planning and Roadmapping at Airbus where he was responsible for roadmapping a $1-billion R&D portfolio. His passion is to improve life on our home planet Earth through research and education, while paving the way for humanity’s future off-world settlements. Since January 2022 he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.