Ahmad A. Malik is a Project Manager with the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 2015, Ahmad embedded with the NASA RIS4E Team on Mount Kilaeua, Hawaii to help develop geological remote sensing instruments for future human spaceflight missions to Mars. This sparked a passion for framing space exploration as an ultimately human enterprise – stories and values accessible to all people. Ahmad graduated from Stony Brook University with Honors in Political Science and minors in Journalism and Business Management, with advanced coursework and research in astrophysics. He completed two senior theses, The Political Viability of Space Exploration and Recalibrating Optical Time Photometry to Characterize Stellar Novae. Ahmad is also an avid musician, skier, hiker, and yoga instructor. You will likely find him in a National Park on the weekends.