Dario Izzo is currently the scientific coordinator of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team.  Graduated as a Doctor of Aeronautical Engineering from the University Sapienza of Rome in 1999. He later took a second master in “Satellite Platforms” at the University of Cranfield in the UK and completed his Ph.D. in Mathematical Modelling at the University Sapienza of Rome where he taught classical mechanics and space flight mechanics. He published more than 200 papers and pioneered the use of emerging AI techniques for space, with a particular early focus on evolutionary computations and neural computations. Dario Izzo is also the recipient of the Humies Gold Medal for the creation of an AI system having human-competitive capabilities in the design interplanetary trajectories. .