Pierre Bertrand is a dual degree graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: master’s in Aerospace Engineering and master’s in Technology and Policy. He is primarily interested in how to use new technologies to assist society by understanding the technical challenges of developing new technologies in combination with business and management.

Through the Technology and Policy Program, he performed research in public engagement and international cooperation for space agencies. He collected and analyzed big data from social media including the nature of interaction, popularity of accounts, and audience demographics. He designed an interactive web application for space agencies to better understand the social media network related to human spaceflight. He also worked on a research project in collaboration with NASA headquarters on the use of citizen science, open innovation and social media for space applications.

He worked as a researcher assistant with Professor Dava Newman on spacesuit mobility using wearable sensors and stochastic estimation algorithms as a novel method to track biomechanics. He collaborated with the David Clark Incorporated Company and the NASA Johnson Space Center performing experiments on different spacesuits, providing unique analysis that informed designers about human-spacesuit interaction and helped to mitigate the risk of astronaut injuries. His research demonstrated the capability of performing in-suit sensing and real-time monitoring, and has several implications for future planetary exploration as increase Extravehicular activities performance. The expertise developed by Pierre has multiple applications in athletics or the medical field, and has already been applied to different types of suits. His experience with space systems also extends to satellite engineering. He is currently the lead thermal engineer for a 6U Cubesat design NASA competition with its MIT team.

Before his experience at MIT, Pierre graduated with a Master of Engineering degree from Ecole Centrale Paris, where he worked with Professor Christophe Laux in the EM2C Combustion Laboratory on the characterization of atmospheric reentry plasma, and gain insight into multidisciplinary engineering: fluid mechanics, electrical engineering, communications systems.