# Juno Woods, PhD > OG mission designer and analyst on the first private spacecraft to land on the Moon, Nova-C. Location: Berkeley, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/junowoodsphd 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. ## Work Experience ### Senior GN&C Engineer II @ Astranis Space Technologies Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Responsible engineer for onboard navigation and ground-based orbit determination ### Senior Software Engineer, Control Systems @ Charm Industrial Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States Automation, control systems, software engineering for our pyrolyzers, ironmaking, and other processes. Designed and built a custom automation and controls architecture from scratch. Charm pyrolyzes agricultural waste into bio-oil and permanently sequesters it underground. ### Consultant: GN&C Engineer — 6-DOF @ Masten Space Systems Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 Guidance algorithms, navigation design, and sensor models for XL-1 lander. ### Co-Founder @ Cislune Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 Solutions for lunar settlement, including LunaNet-compatible radios and ISRU. ### Senior Researcher @ Open Lunar Foundation Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, California, United States ### Director of Engineering Research & Strategy @ Open Lunar Foundation Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Dr. Woods works on problems at the intersection of space policy and engineering. In this role, she performed market analyses for open hardware, studied the history and present state of export control regulations, reviewed collective invention and pre-competitive innovation, and wrote grants (e.g. NASA SBIRs). ### Research and Strategy @ Open Lunar Foundation Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Guidance, Navigation, and Control @ Open Lunar Foundation Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco, California Dr. Woods worked on navigation and mission design for an open source lunar lander. Over the course of six months, she developed linear covariance analysis tools, prototyped a q-method extended Kalman filter (an attitude filter), and worked on orbit determination software for trade studies on sensors and ranging strategies. She also derived measurement models for two-way ranging and range-rate measurements. In 2020, Dr. Woods supervised a graduate student developing a circular restricted three-body problem cislunar trajectory optimization tool. ### Senior Development Engineer @ Intuitive Machines Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 | Houston, Texas Area Dr. Woods was hired at Intuitive Machines to work on the company's Universal Return Vehicle as well as Moon Express' MX-1 moon lander; over the course of three months, she re-derived and documented the navigation filter and measurement models, while also improving TRICK simulation sensor models. Woods also constructed the preliminary GN&C design, including sensor trades, for the Axiom commercial space station and its initial ISS rendezvous mission. Juno developed state estimation solutions for drilling systems, including complementary filters, extended Kalman filters, and batch least squares estimators. She developed their fundamental understanding of IMUs while performing an observability analysis of single-axis rate-integrating gyroscopes for gyrocompassing. Later, Dr. Woods spent several months working on gravimetry and GPS-denied navigation using NASA Langley's Navigation Doppler LIDAR, a task which included EKF and measurement model derivation, hardware field testing, and GUI development. She also assisted a study on cislunar navigation architectures which looked at radiometric ranging and range-rate using dilution of precision as a metric. Woods was also a core part of the GN&C and mission design team for IM's NOVA-C lunar lander (IM is one of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services teams) in its first year, producing some of the initial sensor specifications. Juno generated an initial reference trajectory using a patched conic strategy plus Apollo guidance quartics, and produced a SPICE-based API for accessing reference trajectories and spacecraft sensor information. She defined pointing rules and produced a launch-to-landing attitude timeline, wrote software to generate Chebyshev polynomials for uplinking trajectories, and produced a preliminary linear covariance analysis for sensor and ranging trade studies, including deriving a terrain-relative navigation measurement model. ### Post-doctoral Fellow — Aerospace Engineer @ West Virginia University Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Morgantown, WV In the West Virginia University Applied Space Exploration Laboratory (ASEL), Dr. Woods worked in on-orbit non-cooperative relative navigation. Their main area of research was 6 degrees-of-freedom pose initialization using LIDAR, relative to natural and artificial objects. For their main project, Dr. Woods wrote, in C++, an orbital physics simulator, sensor models (star trackers, IMUs/gyroscopes, and GPS), an OpenGL-based LIDAR simulator (GLIDAR, now released under an open source license), and a dual inertial state multiplicative extended Kalman filter. Finally, Dr. Woods worked on imaging technologies for space-based remote sensing of minerals and planetary geological features. ### National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow @ University of Texas at Austin Jan 2007 – Jan 2014 | Austin, Texas Dr. Woods worked in four labs in their first year at the University of Texas (Ellington, Marcotte, Wilke, and Sawyer) before finally landing in the Marcotte Lab for her dissertation research. In the Wilke Lab, Woods' research focus was HIV; she wrote Python-based Monte Carlo simulations of HIV evolution to demonstrate that T cells were not the virus' only reservoir in the body. Her work in the Sawyer Lab involved writing statistical analysis tools in C++ for identifying positive selection in protein sequences. For Andy Ellington, she designed and implemented a plan to perform simple metabolic engineering in E. coli. Juno’s dissertation research involved the construction of an expert recommendation system and prediction of gene–disease associations from gene–phenotype associations in distantly related species; for example, the group identified a gene involved in hearing impairment on the basis of its role in a plant phenotype, negative gravitropism (an association Woods discovered). ### Undergraduate Research Assistant @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 | Blacksburg, Virginia Woods worked in machine translation on the problem of noun phrase identification in multiple languages using hidden Markov models. Later, she worked with Dr. Bradley Klein in the Virginia–Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, who was analyzing a mouse model for Parkinson's. Finally, Juno studied computational quantum chemistry with Dr. Crawford in the Department of Chemistry. ### Assistant Instructor @ Khan's Martial Arts Academy Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 | Burke, Virginia Juno Woods assisted with the teaching of Chung Do Kwan Tae Kwon Do to all ages — both at Khan's and with the Tae Kwon Do Club at Virginia Tech. She continued to teach at VT after Khan's closed in 2006. ## Education ### Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology (Bioinformatics) The University of Texas at Austin ### BS in Computer Science Virginia Tech ### St. Stephen's & St. Agnes School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/translunar - Website: https://translunar.industries --- Source: https://flows.cv/junowoodsphd JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/junowoodsphd/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01