Dr. Ajay Kothari is President and Founder of Astrox Corporation, an Aerospace R&D company located in suburban Washington DC. His PhD and MS in Aerospace Engineering are from University of Maryland. He has been Principal Investigator or Program Manager on more than 30 contracts from DOD, DARPA and NASA, focused on rocket and hypersonic vehicle designs and studies which have led to an innovative hypersonic vehicle design for the Air Force in collaboration with Boeing. He has been a pioneer in developing the Inward Turning Hypersonic Vehicles which will be able to go to Low Earth Orbit. He has over 48 professional publications in peer reviewed AIAA journals and various AIAA, CRASTE and JANNAF conferences.

He was President of his high school and was recipient of the "Best Student of the School" award for scholarship and extracurricular activities. He was also awarded National Merit Scholarship. He was awarded the "Engineer of the Year" award by ASEI (American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin) in 2011, was the president of ASEI National Capital Chapter from 2014-2015 and on WHEELS Global Foundation board from 2016-2018. He has been invited to speak on aerospace subjects by many entities, interviewed on television shows and his articles on space related topics have been published by various newspapers. He is a Life Member and Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is also the first Indian-American member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) for Washington-Baltimore region, having acted in a few TV shows as a hobby in US like “Law and Order”, “The Wire”, and others for NBC, HBO and other Hollywood and independent film productions.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajay-kothari-739b0b32/