Dr. Ed Lu, Executive Director of the Asteroid Institute, served as a NASA Astronaut for twelve years. He flew aboard the Space Shuttle twice, flew on the Russian Soyuz to the International Space Station and has logged over 206 days in space. Dr. Lu has been an active research scientist working in the fields of solar physics, astrophysics, plasma physics, cosmology, and planetary science. He held positions at the High Altitude Observatory, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, and the Institute for Astronomy. At Google, he led the Advanced Projects group which built imaging and data gathering systems for Google Earth and Maps, Google StreetView, and Google Books. He is a co-founder of B612 Foundation, the only organization in the world dedicated to finding, mapping and deflecting asteroids.