Bio
Sepehr Bastami serves as an Aerospace Research Engineer and joined the Crew Systems and Aviation Operations Branch in January of 2022. His current research at the CSAOB is focused on enabling autonomous operations for the next generation of urban air mobility vehicles. Mr. Bastami also supports the NASA SBIR program as a subtopic manager and technical monitor. Mr. Bastami has previously served on detail as an Integration Lead for the Axiom Commercial Element and HTV-X spacecraft propulsion systems with the safety and mission assurance organization at Johnson Space Center. He is currently the Technical Lead for the development of Autoland performance requirements for VTOL aircraft under the Airspace Traffic Management and Safety project.
From April to December 2022, Mr. Bastami took part in the NASA FIRST (Foundations of Influence, Relationships, Success, and Teamwork) program; a highly competitive, agency-wide leadership development program that spanned 8 months with 60 cohort members from 10 NASA centers. Mr. Bastami served as the Deputy Project Manager for the cohort’s project on Future of Work, which was delivered to the agency’s Future of Work team at NASA headquarters and has been implemented agency-wide.
Mr. Bastami earned an LLB in International Law in 2015 from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. He changed career paths to engineering and earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 2019 and a Master of Science in Engineering in 2021 from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Nuclear and Radiation Engineering at UT Austin where he is researching modeling and shielding of high-energy neutrons. He is the recipient of numerous NASA Texas Space Grant Consortium scholarships and an engineering excellence scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include next-generation aviation operations, radiation modeling and shielding, and extreme environments habitation. His hobbies include soccer, tennis, hiking, Scuba diving, and flying. Mr. Bastami is currently training to become a private pilot.