He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in 2002 from Purdue University. He joined NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2003. He was a senior technologist at JPL and a lecturer in GALCIT at Caltech. At JPL, Dr. Ackmese developed control algorithms for planetary landing, formation ying spacecraft, and asteroid and comet sample return missions. He was the developer of the “flyaway” control algorithms in Mars Science Laboratory, which successfully landed on Mars in August 2012. His realtime convex optimization based planetary landing algorithm was successfully flight tested by NASA, which demonstrated dramatic performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art. Dr. Ackmese is an Associate Fellow of AIAA and a senior member of IEEE.