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Dr. Karan Jani is an award-winning astrophysicist and Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University, where he serves as the founding director of the Vanderbilt Lunar Labs Initiative. He is the Principal Investigator of the Laser Interferometer Lunar Antenna (LILA)—a proposed next-generation experiment on the Moon to probe the quantum nature of gravity. Dr. Jani is an author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications on black holes, gravitational waves, and AI-enabled astrophysics. His research contributions include the first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO (2017 Nobel Prize in Physics) and the discovery of the first confirmed intermediate-mass black hole. For these achievements, he was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and named to Forbes’s “30 Under 30” All-Star List. Jani earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Georgia Tech and dual B.S. degrees in Astronomy–Astrophysics and Physics from Penn State. His global outreach includes a widely viewed TED talk, “Listening to the Universe,” and ongoing advocacy for enabling transformative science from the Moon.