Dr. Andrea Lani is a research and team manager at KU Leuven’s Center for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics, AIAA member, co-author of 100+ scientific papers. He has previously been a senior research engineer at Von Karman Institute, postdoc at NASA Ames/Stanford Center for Turbulence Research and NATO STO technical member. For 20+ years he has led the development of innovative models/software to simulate hypersonic flows around spacecrafts (as co-designer/manager of the COOLFluiD platform) and solar/space weather plasmas (as co-designer/lead developer of ESA's Virtual Space Weather Modeling Center and COCONUT). He has recently coordinated (as PI) MEESST, a large European Innovation Council Pathfinder project (10 organizations, 30+ scientists/engineers, 3.5M euros) which developed the first high-temperature superconductor-based magnetic shield demonstrator for space re-entry.