Daynan Crull is a cofounder of Karman+, a venture created to mine near-Earth asteroids and provide abundant, sustainable water and mineral resources for the space economy. He leads the company’s science and technology effort, including the strategy for detecting and characterizing candidate asteroids and mission design analysis for resource extraction, drawing on remote sensing and machine learning to find water in space.

Before Karman+, Daynan was a Senior Consultant and Data Scientist at New Light Technologies, specializing in machine learning for remote sensing. He led research projects for organizations including the World Bank and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, investigating the urban heat island effect and developing novel remote sensing data science packages, such as tools that harmonize nighttime light satellite data time series. Earlier, he was a Senior Data Scientist at GeoPhy, a real estate data company, where he contributed to core inference models and data science methodologies.

His career also includes public service with the City of New York, most recently as Director of Strategy and Performance for the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, where he implemented a statistics-based approach to infrastructure monitoring, and before that as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Mayor’s Office on Michael Bloomberg’s special task force for rebuilding and resiliency after Hurricane Sandy. Daynan holds an M.S. in informatics from New York University and a B.A. from DePauw University, serves on the board of 100cameras, and lives in New York City.