Stardust's Kartik Kumar will be giving a talk at the inaugural University of Maryland 2014 Orbital Debris Workshop. Kartik will speak at Panel Two: Technology Issues. The CODER Workshop will feature many well known names, but perhaps none as renowned as Donald Kessler - the NASA scientist who led the way in identifying Orbital Debris as a potential problem.

You can find detail on the Panels and Speakers here:
http://www.coder.umd.edu/workshop

Kartik completed his Bachelors and Masters in Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology, where he is finalizing a Ph.D. on the dynamics of Uranus' outer ring system. He is currently employed as Senior Engineer at Dinamica Srl in Milan, Italy, where he is primarily responsible for space debris research within the context of the Stardust network. He is the principal architect of Tudat, a set of open-source, C++ libraries for astrodynamics modeling and simulation. His main interests include: celestial mechanics, mission design, optimal control, and evolutionary algorithms.