Chiara Manfletti

Chiara Manfletti has a dual Italian and German nationality. She holds a degree in aeronautical engineering from Imperial College London (2001), a masters degree in “space studies” from the International Space University (ISU) in Strasbourg (2002) and a PhD from German University of Aachen (2010). She also holds a masters in history from the UK Open University (2013). She worked for the German Aerospace Center, DLR, as a research engineer in the field of liquid rocket propulsion and later joined the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2016, where she has been the Programme Advisor to the Director General at the agency’s headquarters in Paris and guided the process of preparing ESA Ministerial Meetings and coordinating programmatic content proposed to Member States for subscription and their financial elements. In March 2019 she was nominated President of the President of the then just founded Portuguese national space agency, Portugal Space. She was seconded from ESA to Portugal and within one-and-half years setup the space agency from scratch as a modern space agency and established a new space implementation strategy for Portugal working with partners within and outside of the country. In September 2020, she returned to ESA as the Head of Policy and Programmes Coordination department at ESA. Today she is Professor of Space Propulsion at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Chief Operating Officer of Neuraspace.