Fredrick (Rick) Jenet, PhD, is the founder and executive director of Expanding Frontiers, a nonprofit organization based in Brownsville, Texas, with a mission to foster the growth of a commercial space ecosystem. Dr. Jenet is an experienced entrepreneur, visionary researcher, and innovative educator, having founded several initiatives in Texas that are fostering the development of a state and national ecosystem for space exploration and commercialization. He is the founder of the Center for Advanced Radio Astronomy, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s first center of excellence, as well as STARGATE, a NewSpace technology development program with facilities at the Boca Chica launch complex in South Texas.
He is also the founder of Rockets and Rigs, an academic/industry/government collaboration working to solve common problems and challenges in both the space development and energy sectors. Dr. Jenet graduated from MIT with a B.S. in Physics in 1993 and obtained his PhD in physics from Caltech in 2001. He was a senior research scientist at Schlumberger-Doll Research Center and a Postdoctoral Scholar at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.