Jiya Janowitz is the CTO of Astral Materials, where he is the team’s critical link between its materials manufacturing goals and building hardware that integrates with commercial space infrastructure. Janowitz completed his B.S. in materials science and his M.S. in aerospace engineering at Stanford University, where he performed research in Professor Debbie Senesky’s XLab. Before joining Astral Materials, Janowitz led the development of several successful automated science payloads that flew to the International Space Station.

Astral Materials is driving the next leap in materials engineering by manufacturing semiconductors of a quality and consistency that cannot be made on Earth. The company’s proprietary microgravity crystal growth furnace produces ultra-high-quality semiconductor crystals that address the growing needs of advanced applications currently bottlenecked by semiconductor crystal quality.