Dr. Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute and GP for Aurelia Foundry Fund, where she strives to bring humanity’s space exploration future to life. Through space architecture R&D, education and outreach, and investments in new space start-ups, she is building an ecosystem to expand humanity’s horizons, democratize access to opportunities in low Earth orbit, and scale up life in space. Ariel was the founding Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of 50+ students, faculty, and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration.

Ariel graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy from Yale University and designed a novel space architecture habitat for her MIT PhD in autonomously self-assembling space structures. Her “TESSERAE” research work and the labs she leads build towards future habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars.

Ariel is the author/editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT Press 2021), serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee and XPRIZE Global Visioneering Committee. She holds an appointment as a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center and at Tokyo’s Chiba Institute of Technology. Ariel’s work has been featured in 2025 mainstage TED talk, WIRED, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, NPR, numerous academic papers, top tech podcasts from Lex Fridman to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and more.