Nancy Maryboy, Ph.D.

Nancy C Maryboy, Ph.D. is the Founding President and Executive Director of the Indigenous Education Institute (IEI), located in the San Juan Islands, Washington and on the Navajo Nation. She is an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington, in the school of Environmental Sciences and Forestry. She was a part-time faculty member in the department of Physics and Astronomy at Northern Arizona University, developing and teaching Indigenous Astronomy for 15 years.  A graduate of Smith College, she was a graduate student at Stanford University and a student, teacher and administrator at Diné College.

She has worked with NASA for over 20 years. Currently, Dr. Maryboy works with NASA HEAT, and the Superfund at University of New Mexico.  She has been Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundation for many years. She is also Chairman of the Board of Whiteswan Environmental, a Coast Salish traditional organization located in Lummi, WA.

She is the co-author of Sharing the Skies: Navajo Astronomy – A Cross-Cultural View. Dr. Maryboy is the administrator of three Makerplace projects with local schools in the Pacific NW, Hawai’i and the Southwest, funded by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Labs and three space missions – EZIE, Parker Solar Probe, and Dragonfly. She was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award as a Guardian of Cultural Lifeways from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums. Dr Maryboy is Diné and Cherokee. She comes from a family of Diné traditional and medical healers, in Oregon and White Rocks, Bluff, Utah.

David Begay, Ph.D.

David Begay, Ph.D. is currently Associate Research Professor with the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. David is a former part-time faculty at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, in the Department of Physics and Astronomy for 15 years.  He is also a former professor and academic dean and VP for Dine’ (Navajo Nation) College.

He is currently VP for the Indigenous Education Institute, Friday Harbor, Washington. He has also worked with NSF and other federal projects including NASA for 20 plus years, Jet Propulsion Lavatory, and Goddard Space Flight Center on space science and heliophysics education outreach.

David is considered a tribal elder and provides cultural consultant services to many organizations and corporations both in the United States and internationally.