Dr. Ioana Cozmuta is currently working as a contractor at NASA as the Industry Innovation and Microgravity Lead, in the NASA Space Portal and the Emerging Space Office at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. In this position Dr. Cozmuta leads suborbital and orbital platforms commercialization efforts from the perspective of microgravity utilization. Her activity is primarily centered around identifying and reviewing, using due diligence, case studies in material and life sciences, with high market and economic potential and defining implementation strategies focused on microgravity utilization through active industry engagement across various verticals of the private sector. The active engagement of partners from the private sector, financiers and investors revolves around identifying challenges and opportunities for doing business in space and proactively creating new opportunities by connecting government, industry partners, emerging space providers and academia. To that extent, dr. Cozmuta has developed the concept of Economic Readiness Level as a selection criteria for relevant technologies by integrating technology maturation with existing market pull and smart investment strategies to maximize the technology potential economic and market impact.

Dr. Cozmuta has a broad hands on, deep expertise in a wide variety of areas in science, engineering and business covering Applied Physics, Computational Chemistry, Material Science, Bio and Nanotechnology, Genomics, Medical Physics, Entry Descent and Landing systems, Engineering Risk Assessment, etc.

Dr. Cozmuta holds a Ph.D. degree in Physics from University of Groningen, the Netherlands and a M.Sc in Biophysics and Medical Physics from University Babes Bolyai, Cluj Napoca, Romania. She was a Research Postdoctoral Fellow (2000-2002) in the Material and Process Simulation Center, Department of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology and a Research Postdoctoral Specialist (2002-2003) at the Genome Technology Center, School of Medicine at Stanford University.