Cadence Payne is a Remote Sensing Scientist in the Imaging Spectroscopy Department at The Aerospace Corporation. She earned her PhD in Aerospace Engineering from MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2024, following a master’s from the same program in 2020. A CubeSat specialist with expertise in systems engineering, payload/mission design, and remote sensing for environmental monitoring, Cadence contributed to eight CubeSat missions at MIT. She won two launch grants through NASA’s CSLI program and led systems engineering and payload performance modeling for AEROS, Portugal’s first CubeSat mission. Beyond academia, she served as Engineering Director for Enoir Power Technologies, a startup developing solar- and thermal-powered egg incubation systems for rural poultry farmers in West Africa. She is a member of the Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship Program (MIFP) and the GEM Fellowship, a peer mentor for both MIFP and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship, and recently represented MIFP on a zero-gravity flight hosted by Zero-G and the Aurelia Institute. In 2022, Cadence was named an IAF Future Space Leader and subsequently published and presented three manuscripts at IAC in Paris. Passionate about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), she actively promotes racial and gender equity and equality in the space industry and is furthering these efforts as a Program Team member for SGAC’s 2025 Our Giant Leap Hackathon. At MIT, she co-founded AeroAfro, a community for Black students in her department, and received multiple departmental and institutional awards for her DEI work. Originally from a small town in Kentucky (~2,700 people), Cadence was the first in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree. She is also the first Black woman to earn both a master’s and PhD from MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Leonardo is pursuing a PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego, where he studies and analyzes stable orbits for future space exploration missions to the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter. He was born in Ensenada, Mexico, where he earned a BSc in Physics and an MSc from the Faculty of Science at the Autonomous University of Baja California. He also obtained a Diploma in the Aerospace Industry from the Ensenada Institute of Technology. In 2019, he was recognized by the local government with Ensenada’s Municipal Youth Award for Academic Merit and Baja California’s State Youth Award in Science and Technology. Leonardo is passionate about outreach and STEM education. He frequently participates in outreach events, presenting experiments and giving public talks in the region. He has also collaborated in organizing numerous STEM events, including conferences, workshops, and public demonstrations. Among these, he contributed to SGAC, helping to organize the 2nd North, Central America, and the Caribbean Space Generation Workshop, and participated in other SGAC events. He firmly believes that space holds immense potential for humanity, particularly for Latin American countries that are beginning to engage in this field.

Ahmed Abdi is the founder of Africa Space Workshops (ASW) and previously has been the Africa Regional Partnerships Manager of Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC). As a former refugee Ahmed has had even more appreciation for how space can benefit improving lives and bring innovation in emerging and non-space faring nations. Being actively involved for more than a decade in organising space workshops, it has always been his goal to advance space to regions and countries with little to no space activities, especially after attending space conferences in the past where such voices particularly in the African continent would not be heard or presented, he got even more motivated to be actively involved in advancing space in Africa. For these reasons, Ahmed founded Africa Space Workshops (ASW) in late 2017. Along with the ASW team, they have organised and participated in space workshops in Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia and have many more African countries as well as emerging and non-space faring nations and regions, and they continue to plan to organise more space workshops. The vision Ahmed has in the medium to long term is to create a network of all those places he has organised space workshops to create an African space startup ecosystem where African space startups can be created and flourish. 

* 2023 Nebula Award Winner