Madhu Thangavelu

Recognized under Tier 3 — Structural Habitats & Space Architecture, Madhu Thangavelu has spent decades doing innovative work in space architecture and space settlement design. Thangavelu's teaching and research at the University of Southern California — spanning lunar and Mars base concepts, orbital settlement designs, and space architecture education — has helped build the academic discipline of space architecture itself and trained generations of students to think rigorously about how humans will live and work beyond Earth. This sustained conceptual design and planning work provides an important creative and intellectual foundation for the practical habitat designs that Mars colonization will ultimately require.