Daynan and his co-founders created Karman+ with the mission to mine near-earth asteroids to provide abundant, sustainable water and mineral resources for the space economy. Daynan leads the science and technology effort, including the strategy for detecting and characterizing candidate asteroids and conducting mission design analysis for resource extraction.

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

Previously, he served the City of New York, most recently as Director of Strategy and Performance for the NYC Dept. of I.T. and Telecoms., where he implemented a statistics-based approach to infrastructure monitoring, and before that as a Sr. Policy Advisor in the Mayor’s Office as part of Michael Bloomberg’s special task force for rebuilding and resiliency following Hurricane Sandy.

Daynan’s research and work has centered on informatics (data retrieval and inference related to information systems). He is particularly interested in the application of machine learning and advances in data processing to improve and scale methods of signal processing for remotely sensed data.

Daynan received an M.S. in informatics from New York University and a B.A. from DePauw University. He serves on the board for 100cameras, a non-profit dedicated to teaching photography, and lives in New York City.