Dr. Sun Hur-Diaz received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 1988 and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 1989 and 1994, respectively.  Her technical focus has been in guidance, navigation, and control including optimal control, flight dynamics, orbit determination and control, attitude determination and control, and systems engineering. 

Dr. Hur-Diaz is currently the Vice President of Eastern Region at Emergent Space Technologies, Inc. in Greenbelt, Maryland.  She oversees engineering projects and supports business development for Emergent in Maryland and Virginia, including NASA GSFC and DARPA. When she joined Emergent in 2005, she worked on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Life Extension Initiative where she developed new attitude filters and controllers leading to the development of three new reduced-sensor/reduced-actuator modes that enable continuous science operations as onboard gyros fail.   For her work on the HST, she was awarded the Robert H. Goddard Individual and Team Engineering Excellence Awards and the NASA Public Service Group Award.  She has also managed numerous projects such as NASA GSFC Formation Flying Test Bed, Orbit Determination Toolbox, DARPA F6 fractionated GN&C, and other technical studies involving advanced navigation algorithms.

Before joining Emergent, Dr. Hur-Diaz was at Intelsat Global Services, Inc. in Washington, D.C. where she performed flight dynamics ground software development, mission analysis and operations for Intelsat’s large fleet of geostationary satellites.  She also participated in the orbit raising campaigns of numerous geostationary satellites. 

Previous to Intelsat, Dr. Hur-Diaz was at Space Systems/Loral in Palo Alto, CA where she worked on numerous R&D projects including improving image navigation with star trackers on GOES, developing the onboard navigation filter for the Tensor GPS receiver flown on Globalstar, and optimal low-thrust orbit raising and station keeping algorithms for geostationary satellites.

For her graduate degree, Dr. Hur-Diaz performed research on optimal trajectories using solar sails and developed methods of optimal transfer and station keeping of solar sails near libration points.  

While she was an undergraduate, she interned at Jet Propulsion Laboratory through the UT Engineering Co-op Program.  There she worked on the mission design of the Galileo Mission to Jupiter.

Dr. Hur-Diaz is a co-inventor on four US patents related to satellite imaging control, onboard attitude control with star sensing, autonomous GPS time reference for space application, and low thrust orbit raising for geosynchronous satellites.