Crew 124 - EuroMoonMars A

Kent Nebregall is the son of a former test pilot and an artist. He has been an avid follower of space technology since Apollo-Soyuz, when he was seven years old. In 2004, Kent won the Kepler Prize for Mars Mission Design from the Mars Society, and was later part of MDRS Crew 32. He has done space technology and design presentations for Mensa, The Mars Society, The National Space Society, The Heinlein Centennial, the Chicago Astronomical Society, Worldcon, and the 100-Year Starship Symposium.  Kent is also a NASA JPL Solar System Ambassador and in the Chicago Society for Space Studies Speakers Guild.Kent works as a business analyst in the Chicago area, while also running a start-up called Day Five, LLC.  He enjoys writing, hiking, photography, reading science and history, and designing off-grid modular architectures for earth, space, and oceanic applications.  Kent lives in St Charles, IL.  

Audrey Bruneau is a second-year master degree student in Cognitics at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Cognitique of Bordeaux, France. She has a bachelor degree in mathematics and cognitive sciences.  She is highly interested in cognitive sciences, and wants to bridge the gap between human factors and engineering for more user-centered technologies. She spent the last summer as a trainee at the European Space Agency and worked on a data management system for the MELiSSA life support research program.On her spare time, she loves to travel and experience different cultures. She has been teaching mathematics as a private teacher for the last 4 years and she enjoys this job very much. She thinks that stimulating the mind of her students is a challenging task that constantly requires for her to be creative. Audrey looks forward to participating in MDRS to contribute to space exploration research and to join this adventure.

Since graduating with a BS in Physics, Paula has been a research and development scientist workingin remote sensing sensor calibration and data analysis. Additionally, in February through October of

2007 she was a Research Associate at McMurdo Station, Antarctica launching a series of ozonesondes

to collect data on the ozone hole as it forms throughout the winter. While there she was delighted to

observe how different living with a small, isolated group in an extreme environment was, socially and

psychologically. Her experience in Antarctica inspired a return to school and she is now pursing an MS

in Space Studies at University of North Dakota to study both human factors of space exploration and

remote sensing of the cryosphere.

Paula spends most of her free time outdoors year-round. She competes in orienteering races and sprint

triathlons, snorkels New England’s coastline, and hikes or snowshoes the many trails of New England’s

interior. She is a certified Wilderness First Responder.

April Davis is a student at MiraCosta College, where she works as a program assistant for the MiraCosta Astronomy Department. At the age of 18 she enlisted in the US Army, spending most of her enlistment in Mannheim, Germany as a truck driver in the Army’s only active duty bulk fuel company. She did one tour of duty in Iraq, as part of the invading force attached to the Third Infantry Division. After returning home, April worked as an engineering technician at Infineon Technologies, providing inline quality control for all stages of 200mm/300mm wafer production. Last summer, April drove from the Atlantic Ocean coastline to the Pacific Ocean coastline, in a month long camping adventure chasing America’s most interesting and beautiful geology. She is now pursuing a degree in planetary geology with an emphasis in geophysics, in hopes of one day applying that education from a habitat on Mars.

Tristan Holotnak is 27 and a research assistant and graduate student from Canada. Tristan Holotnak lives in Calgary, Alberta but enjoys travelling throughout western Canada, Europe, and Asia.

As a child, he developed an interest in space and remote exploration and is interested in rural and disaster medicine. He has extensive experience working as a research assistant in emergency medicine at the Foothills Hospital in Calgary and as a patient safety intern at the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Tristan has recently completed his graduate studies in the MPH program at the University of Manchester where he wrote his master’s dissertation on facilitating patient flow in Alberta emergency departments. He has recently been accepted into medical school in London and is looking forward to beginning his studies in September of 2013.

DENNIS OLTHETEN - CREW GEOLOGIST

Dennis Oltheten is currently finishing his Bachelor degree in geology at the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, VU University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. With a previous study in automotive engineering and a wide variety of interests he is multi disciplinary. Besides his current study he expresses his passion for earth and her natural aspects in travelling, wave surfing, paragliding, scuba diving, sailing and wood sculpting. 

During his study he combines the sedimentological, structural, geochemical and physical geological disciplines to mostly field orientated researches. For his bachelor thesis he performed a fieldwork in the North-eastern Apennines in Italy to investigate the structural relation of small, outcrop scaled, features to determine the larger synthesis of the fold and thrust belt that forms this mountain chain. 

With a last minute introduction to the MDRS crew 124, he is fairly new to planetary science but nevertheless even more enthusiastic in participating to explore and contribute to the geological aspects of the MoonMars project.