Maya is a PhD candidate in the Aerospace Engineering department at MIT, working on the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) for NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover. A native of Lebanon, she received her acceptance to MIT at the age of 16. Featured on the New York Times and as a TED talk speaker for her advocacy, Maya is passionate about increasing global representation and access in the space sector and bringing awareness to nationality-based discrimination in career opportunities for foreign nationals. She is the Policy Lead for the Space Generation Advisory Council Taskforce on US Space Policy and part of the Space Consortium at Harvard and MIT. Outside of MIT, she loves traveling around the world, painting, and writing Arabic poetry.