Ron Garan, who lived and worked in space for 178 days, is a highly decorated Fighter Pilot and Test Pilot, Explorer, Entrepreneur and Humanitarian who believes that appropriately designed and targeted social enterprise can solve many of the problems facing our world.

He flew on both the US Space Shuttle and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, traveling 71,075,867 miles in 2,842 orbits of our planet during his 178 days in space and 27 hours and 3 minutes of EVA during four spacewalks.

Ron is also an aquanaut who participated in the joint NASA-NOAA, NEEMO-9 mission, an exploration research mission held in Aquarius, the world’s only undersea research laboratory. During this mission he and the crew spent 18 continuous days living and working on the ocean floor. He has logged more than 5,000 flight hours in more than 30 aircraft types.

Ron’s last assignment was in NASA's Open Innovation Initiative, which seeks to increase openness, transparency, collaboration, and innovation within government. In this capacity, Ron has been involved in many global mass collaboration and citizen science programs.