Samad Hayati received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Arya-Mehr University in Iran in 1971. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Controls from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 and 1976, respectively. After holding the position of Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Arya-Mehr University, he joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, in 1979. He worked on many aspects of robotics including multiple cooperating robots and snake (multi-joined) robots. In 1990 he focused his work on planetary rovers and led a team that developed the Rocky 7 rover and performed JPL's first remote field tests simulating Mars analog missions. In 2000, he was appointed the technology manager for NASA's Mars Exploration program. This program has developed many enabling technologies for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Project, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the Phoenix Lander, and the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).