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About

Alicia M. Dwyer-Cianciolo is a leading aerospace engineer at NASA whose work is critical to the future of planetary exploration. Her research focuses on the high-stakes physics of Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL)—the final, nail-biting minutes of any space mission. She is best known for her foundational contributions to NASA’s EDL Systems Analysis (EDL-SA) studies, which have guided the agency’s technology investments for landing large payloads on Mars. Her most cited work, the “Phase 1 Report” (97 citations), serves as a key roadmap for both robotic and human-scale Mars missions. More recently, Dwyer-Cianciolo has been instrumental in the SPLICE project, developing cutting-edge Precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance (PL&HA) technologies essential for autonomous navigation on the Moon. By creating simulation frameworks to test these systems, she is directly enabling NASA’s Artemis campaign to return humans to the lunar surface. With a career spanning over a decade of high-impact studies and over 150 combined citations, Dwyer-Cianciolo is a pivotal figure in ensuring that future explorers can touch down safely, whether on the Moon or the rust-red plains of Mars.