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Trustee, Singularity University

Dr. Robert “Bob” Richards is the Founder and CEO of Odyssey Moon Limited, a commercial lunar enterprise based in the Isle of Man and the first official registrant in the $30M Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. He is also the Director of Space Technology at Optech Incorporated of Canada, where he presided over the first commercial lidar scanner flown in space as well as the first meteorological lidar flown to another planet aboard the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander. Dr. Richards studied aerospace and industrial engineering at Ryerson University; physics and astronomy at the University of Toronto; and space science at Cornell University, where he became special assistant to Carl Sagan. In 1987, he founded the International Space University (ISU) with Peter Diamandis and Todd Hawley, where he served as the university’s first Associate Administrator for Strategic Planning and chaired the board’s administrative and strategic planning committees during ISU’s first phase of development.