Speakers

Club celebration of the Cherry Blossom Festival - Ticketed Event

This is a great event to invite Family and Friends

5:30 - 7:30 PM

Appetizer reception

Dress up Photo booth

Entertainment: Uzumaru Yosakoi

Dinner: Royce Mori

Door Prize Drawing

MethaneSAT

On 4 March, 2024, MethaneSAT was successfully launched from Vandenburg Space Force Base, CA on a SpaceX Falcon-9 launch vehicle.  MethaneSAT is the first satellite mission to be 100% donor funded with more than $80 million raised for the mission by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-profit organization. 

MethaneSAT’s goal is simple: to motivate and enable urgent action to reduce methane emissions. MethaneSAT will locate and quantify methane emissions from oil and gas operations almost anywhere on Earth and track progress over time. 

MethaneSAT will provide regular monitoring of regions accounting for at least 80% of global oil and gas production, measuring emissions over large areas and from specific sites. It will see concentration differences as small as three parts per billion and will quantify not only how much is escaping, but also how fast. Cutting Methane emissions now can rapidly slow global warming.

 

Ed Irvin, MethaneSAT Project Director

Ed served over three decades at Lockheed Martin Space, including significant management roles on multiple remote sensing and telecommunication satellite system developments. He has extensive systems engineering, program management and international business development experience. Since 2016, he has operated as a consultant to several commercial startup companies. In 2018, he was recruited by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-profit organization, to lead the MethaneSAT Project. 

Jorge Mota – Program Manager  

Jorge is a system-impacted individual who as a youth experienced incarceration, community violence, abandonment, and mental health challenges. He overcame adversity, received his bachelor's in psychology from SFSU, and became a drug and alcohol counselor (CADC certified). He has been in the recovery/mental health field since 2008, working with adults and youth in the justice system providing psychoeducation and reentry services. Jorge also collaborated with SFSU Project Rebound to continue building the prison to college pipeline, providing consultation and contributing to the formation of the Underground Scholars Program at UC Berkeley. He is an expert facilitating CBT curriculums and is certified to facilitate evidenced-based curriculums such as: Thinking for a Change, Roots of Success, Matrix Drug & Alcohol Curriculum, Relapse Prevention, Denial Management, Alive & Free, MI, and CBISA. Lived experience gives him insight into the generational trauma and challenges that system-impacted youth are experiencing and must overcome to achieve their best possible selves.