Juno Woods

About Juno Woods

Dr. Juno Woods is an entrepreneurial-minded science and engineering policy researcher who enjoys looking at the big picture: how do we make real the positive future we envision? From designing lunar landers to evolutionary biology to space settlement policy to code, Juno brings creativity, intellectual curiosity, and warmth to everything she touches.At the intersection of engineering, science, and policy, Juno has researched the sociology of collective invention (e.g. academic research, open source, and open engineering movements), standardization, and the complex process of balancing access to dual-use technologies with global security and public safety. She is particularly concerned with artificial intelligence and space technology, two technical areas with the potential to either catapult us forward or bring us to our knees.In aerospace, Juno\'s technical expertise is in GN & C, with a focus in navigation and mission design. She derives math that gets spacecraft from Earth to the Moon and beyond, and prototypes, implements, validates, and tests this math. Juno is particularly skilled with talking to hardware, either controlling sensors directly or designing sensor machine learning models that extract useful measurements from complicated inputs.In evolutionary systems biology, Juno worked on expert recommendation systems for prediction of gene–disease associations for congenital birth defects. Her Ph.D. research was funded by a National Science Foundation Fellowship and was twice written up by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times.Juno\'s background is in computer science (B.S, Virginia Tech, National Merit Scholar, 2007, minors in Russian, Philosophy, Mathematics). Her undergraduate research was in natural language processing. She has twenty years of experience with C/C++, and a decade in each of Python and Ruby. While in graduate school, she almost single-handedly wrote the Ruby linear algebra library which was the language standard for many years.Juno is also an experienced organizer of people, as recognized by the Obama Administration in 2014. She co-founded Texas\' only non-profit focusing on non-partisan policy research on gun violence prevention. She is certified in the FEMA incident command system (ICS-100) and trains mental health first responders for Burning Man, the annual arts festival in Nevada.

Experience

1. Senior Gn & C Engineer Ii

   Astranis Space Technologies

   Apr 2024 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   Responsible engineer for onboard navigation and ground-based orbit determination

Education

• The University of Texas at Austin

  Ph.D., Cell and Molecular Biology (Bioinformatics)

  2007 — 2013

• Virginia Tech

  BS, Computer Science

  2002 — 2007