Paolo Tortora is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering with 25 years of experience on small satellites and innovative spacecraft subsystems, including the ground segment, and planetary exploration focusing on radio science experiments with deep space missions. He has substantial Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) experience in the space sector, both in the upstream (design, development and test of advanced systems/sub-systems) and in the downstream (data analysis and science experiments). Dr Tortora is actively engaged in various national and international R&D cooperation programs with industry, government, and academic organizations. He is (and has been) involved as a Co-Investigator on several deep space missions including NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens to the Saturn system, ESA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, NASA Juno mission to Jupiter, ESA JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) mission to the Jupiter system, NASA DART mission to impact the binary asteroid Didymos, ESA Hera mission to the binary asteroid Didymos (post-impact survey), and NASA Europa Clipper to Europa. Also, he’s been involved in three nanosat deep space missions flown by NASA and ASI (Italian Space Agency):  Mars Cube One (MarCO), LICIACube and Argomoon. In terms of research experience related Space Microsystems, Paolo Tortora was the technical coordinator of the ALMASat-1 microsatellite project, successfully launched on the VEGA Maiden Flight in February 2012 and he has been the Program Manager of the European Student Earth Orbiter (ESEO), a micro-satellite mission to Low Earth Orbit, developed, integrated, and tested by European university students as an ESA Education Office project. Between 2012 and 2018 Dr. Tortora was the Director of the BSc and MSc courses in Aerospace Engineering at Università di Bologna. He is the PEGASUS delegate and the Chairman of the Space GTA (University Thematic Group) within Università di Bologna, and Rector’s Delegate for the institutional relations with Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), with the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and with the Network of European Regions Using Space Technologies (NEREUS). Since October 2019 he has been the Director of the Interdepartmental Centre for Aerospace Research, CIRI Aerospace, at Università di Bologna, and interdisciplinary research center with about 50 researchers from 8 different departments. He's the co-founder of 2 spin-off companies (ALMASpace Srl – 2006, which was later acquired and merged with SITAEL S.p.A. to become the largest privately owned company operating in the space sector in Italy, and NautiluS Navigation in Space – 2021). Prof. Tortora is Editor-in-Chief for the Astronautics & Space Science of MDPI’s Aerospace, and Associate Editor for Springer’s CEAS Space Journal.