Peter Diamandis
Chairman & Founder, X Prize Foundation
Peter H. Diamandis has been actively involved in pioneering the commercial aerospace arena. He is the founder of the X Prize Foundation, which has spurred innovation by creating contests for entrepreneurial innovators and inventors to establish new markets and scientific breakthroughs. The X PRIZE Foundation attempts to prove that challenges properly framed and inspired can lead to progress against seemingly intractable challenges.
The organization's first prize, the ANSARI X PRIZE was a $10 million private space flight competition. Currently the goal of Dr. Diamandis is to use this proactive prize model to enable progress in areas including energy, the environment, genomics, nanotechnology, and medicine. Dr. Diamandis presented an overview of the organization along with details regarding future plans to expand the prize model at the Transvision 2007 conference in Chicago, Illinois.
He is the Chairman & Co-Founder of the Rocket Racing League, and serves as the CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation, a commercial space company developing private, FAA-certified parabolic flight utilize Boeing 727-200 aircraft. He is also co-founder of Space Adventures, Inc., the company which brokered Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth's flight to the International Space Station.
In 1987, he co-Founded the International Space University (ISU) where he served as the University's first managing director. Prior to ISU, he served as Chairman of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) an organization he founded at MIT in 1980. SEDS is the world’s largest student pro-space organization.
Dr. Diamandis attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he received his undergraduate degree in molecular genetics and graduate degree in aerospace engineering. After MIT he attended Harvard Medical School where he received his M.D. In 2005 he has was also awarded an honorary Doctorate from the International Space University.
He is the winner of the Konstantine Tsiolkovsky Award, twice the winner of the Aviation & Space Technology Laurel, and the 2003 World Technology Award for Space. In 8th grade, while living in New York, Dr. Diamandis won first place in the Estes rocket design contest.