SIMOC is developed by a team of dynamic individuals spread across the globe. We are creative, enthusiastic, and driven to provide this unique model of an off-world human habitat and scalable community to citizen scientists everywhere. If you are keen to work with us, feel free to reach out.
CURRENT
Kai Staats, SIMOC Project Lead
Kai Staats is a veteran developer of platforms for research and science education. He was co-founder and CEO of the world-renowned Yellow Dog Linux operating system used extensively in Department of Energy, NASA, and University research across a full spectrum of desktop and supercomputer applications. Kai wrote the machine learning algorithm Karoo GP which has been used at LIGO for instrument characterization and synthetic supernovae detection. At Arizona State University Kai led the development of SIMOC, a research-grade computer simulation and educational interface to a Mars habitat, hosted by National Geographic for citizen scientists everywhere. Now, Kai and his team are constructing SAM, a hi-fidelity, hermetically sealed Mars habitat analog with greenhouse, living quarters, airlock, pressure suits, and Mars yard located at the iconic Biosphere 2.
Ezio Melotti, SIMOC Lead Developer
Ezio Melotti is a software engineer, instructor, and innovator, with almost 20 years of experience in software development and programming in several languages. Born in Milan, Italy he lived in Turku, Finland where he graduated from Turku University of Applied Sciences, where he instructed Python Programming. He is a CPython Core Developer with more than 1000 changesets contributed. He is the maintainer of the Python bug tracker and the HTML package, and did extensive work on the test suite, documentation, and standard library. Ezio brings to SIMOC a robust set of coding standards, documentation, and user interface aesthetics and functionality. His keen attention to detail is best expressed in his exquisite photography of the natural world.
Greg Ross, SIMOC Developer
Greg began working with SIMOC as part of the Arizona State University capstone software design team in August of 2021, then later joined the team after the course. He volunteered at SAM during April of 2022, and has otherwise been part of the remote software development team. Greg has a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nevada in 2016.
Meridith Greythorne, SIMOC Developer
Meridith joined the team as a member of ASU’s Software Engineering Capstone program in 2021. Now a graduate with a BS in Software Engineering, she works as a RESTful API developer at a Seattle-based tech company. Meridith is constantly seeking new challenges and opportunities to grow as a developer, and she remains beyond thrilled to be part of a team as cool as SIMOC.
Christopher Murtagh has worked with SIMOC Lead since the early 2000s, providing stable, secure servers and back-end integration for a wide variety of projects and digital adventures. Now, Chris maintains the light travel-time delay email server for visiting crew to SAM, the sealed habitat analog located at the University of Arizona, Biosphere 2, and provides continued support for website and email server and systems integration.
Sheri Klug Boonstra, Navigator & Inspiration Lead
Sheri Klug Boonstra has worked for over a decade as the Director of the Arizona State University Mars Education Program within the Mars Space Flight Facility, School of Earth and Space Exploration. She is the formal education lead for the Mars Public Engagement Team at NASA JPL. The ASU Mars Education Program leads the formal education outreach efforts to K-16 teachers and students for all NASA’s missions to Mars. Sheri has been involved with NASA from 1995-2011, serving on the NASA Headquarters Science Mission Directorate and Advisory Council for Space Center Houston.
FORMER
Grant Hawkins, 2021-23
Grant played a vital role in a transformation of SIMOC, giving new life to the web interface, foundation to the research and data integration for the SIMOC Biosphere 2 preset, and then a complete redesign of the SIMOC Agent-based Model engine. Thank you Grant for all you contributed!
ASU Computer Science Capstone, 2021-22
In a return to ASU’s Computer Science Capstone program this team worked with Ezio and Grant to develop “SIMOC Live”, a version of SIMOC that captures air quality data in real-time through a new back-end. The first implementation of SIMOC Live was demonstrated for the Analog Astronaut Conference in May ’22. In May of ’23 a more robust version of SIMOC Live monitored the air quality of the hermetically sealed and pressurized SAM Mars habitat research vessel at Biosphere 2. Each team member received an Adafruit data sensor array and was actively engaged in the development of Python and Javascript to enable this dynamic upgrade to the SIMOC simulation.
Students: Ian Castellanos, Meridith Greythorne, Ryan Meneses, Gregory Ross, and David Wingar
ASU Computer Science Capstone, 2017-18
This is the team that got the whole thing going! From the very first conference call in September 2017 through May 2018 these enthusiastic, dedicated individuals worked from their remote locations to develop the original SIMOC concept into a working prototype. As noted above, Greg and Thomas were then contracted by Over the Sun by means of continued funding by the ASU Interplanetary Initiative into the spring of 2019.
Students: Thomas Curry, Yves Koulidiati, Ben McCord, Greg Schoberth, and Terry Turner
Former and Founding team members
Danny Jacobs, founding ASU Associate Lead
Judd Bowman, founding ASU Associate Lead
Don Boonstra, founding Education Lead (2018-2020)
Tyler Cox, Phase I prototype ABM Developer
Joey McCord, Phase II Environmental Systems Researcher
Sinéad Walsh, Phase III Developer
Iurii Milovanov, former Lead Developer (2018-20)
Bryan Versteeg, former Visual Designer (2019-21)