David Gerson is the Director of Systems Engineering Technologies at Apogee Research, a small company developing technologies for DARPA to enable the military to rapidly adapt fielded capabilities to unpredictable adversaries. A key focus is on enabling the deployment of compositional, heterogeneous systems in lieu of traditional monolithic platforms.

Prior to Apogee Research, David worked at SpaceX on the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. He was a program manager / integration engineer for the first SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to land back on land post launch and then was a lead systems engineer planning future generations of the rockets. David has also previously spent time at NASA and DLR, the German Space Agency.

David got an MS and BS in Aerospace Engineering from Stanford after becoming obsessed with space policy in high school.