Dr. Ivan Perez is a principal research scientist at KBR @ NASA Ames Research Center, where he investigates the verification and validation of robotics and unmanned vehicles.

He is the Software Lead of NASA’s Lunar Command and Control Interoperability (LuCCI) Project, which seeks to give recommendations, define standards, and carry out trade studies to enable Lunar Surface Systems (LSSs) to operate in an interoperable way. He is also Technical Lead of NASA tools Ogma and Copilot that, together, support mission assurance for aerial vehicles, robots and embedded systems.

Dr. Perez is a Steering Committee member of NASA’s Core Flight System, Center Representative for NASA Ames Research Center in the Steering Committee, and a member of the development team of cFS.

Dr. Perez has also chaired a number of scientific conferences in the field, including the IEEE Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology / Space Computing Conference and the Open Source for Space Workshop.

Prior to joining NASA as a contractor, Dr. Perez founded several functional programming companies focused on games and business applications. With a professional career spanning more than two decades, Dr. Perez has also worked as a programmer and researcher for IMDEA Software (Spain), the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (Germany), the Technical University of Madrid (Spain), and the University of Twente (Netherlands), as well as for multiple functional programming companies. Dr. Perez completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham (UK), focusing on testing and functional programming applied to games and interactive simulations. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Computational Logic and a Degree of Engineer in Computer Science, both from the Technical University of Madrid.