Dr. van Susante is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering - Engineering Mechanics department at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, USA. He graduated from TU-Delft with a MS in Civil Engineering in 2001, a MS and PhD in Engineering Systems from the Colorado School of Mines. He has been involved with Lunar and Mars construction and In-Situ Resource Utilization for 20 years and is the founder of the Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab at MTU which includes a 1.5mx1.5mx2m dusty thermal vacuum chamber and a lunar regolith sandbox for robot testing. He is faculty Advisor of the Mining INnovation Enterprise where we explore space and underwater mining technology. He is PI or Co-I on numerous NASA grants related to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) including mining water on the lunar poles, extracting oxygen from lunar regolith, mining water from hydrated minerals and buried glaciers on Mars as well as PI for one of the inaugural NASA Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) awards. He is also PI for the MTU student team that won the 2020 NASA BIG Idea challenge competition and advises a student team for the NASA Lunabotics Mining competition.