Sana Sharma, MDes

CO-FOUNDER & CDO

Sana Sharma (she/her) is Aurelia Institute’s Chief Design Officer. With expertise in architecture, product design & development, and digital strategy, Sana aims to highlight the human element in science and technology across disciplines throughout her work.

At Aurelia Institute, Sana leads brand, design strategy, and architecture for the organization. She serves as lead for Aurelia’s first foray into human-scale space architecture through the development of the TESSERAE space habitat mockup — a life-size, modular architectural pavilion that engages designers, engineers, and the general public with what life in space may look like in the future. Sana has previously held design innovation roles across a diversity of scientific domains at IBM Quantum, Watson Health, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She has also taught design to engineering students at the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation & Design.

Sana is a research affiliate with the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. There, she leads the Astronaut Ethnography Project, which captures and distills the lived experiences of astronauts and cosmonauts in order to share them broadly with the next generation of designers, engineers, and policy makers for space. Motivated by an abiding love for merging high-tech, sensory, and tactile experiences, she also leads design for Fluid Expressions, a novel art and craft system designed exclusively for use in microgravity.

Sana earned her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at Yale University, and a Master of Design Studies, Technology Concentration from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. While she has worked across multiple disciplines, Sana has held an abiding love for astronomy and space exploration from a young age, having built her first telescope at 8 years old. In her spare time, she enjoys woodworking, trekking, and pottery.