Sander Zandbergen

Sander Zandbergen is a Senior Staff Payload Systems Engineer for the Lazuli Space Observatory at Project Pearl, LLC, where he serves as the technical lead for optical performance across all four instruments: the telescope, wide-field context camera, exoplanet coronagraph, and integral field spectrograph. He bridges the science and engineering teams, translating ambitious astrophysical objectives into implementable technical requirements while managing critical supplier relationships, performance budgets, and system-level trade studies.

Prior to joining Schmidt Sciences, Sander spent over eight years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he led the Optics subsystem and built and delivered flight hardware for Carbon Plume Mapper, an imaging spectrometer designed to detect and quantify greenhouse gas emissions from orbit. His work directly informed CPM’s twin, Tanager-1, which is currently collecting high-resolution methane and CO2 data globally and already boasts several emissions mitigation success stories. Among many other projects, spanning IRAD to Class C missions, he served as lead optical analyst for the TOLIMAN astrometric telescope testbed and SHERA flight project proposal, delivering full telescope and OGSE designs, tolerance analyses, and optical error budgets.

Sander holds a PhD in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona and a B.S. in Physics from Case Western Reserve University. He is passionate about advancing optical systems that enable breakthrough discoveries, from detecting exoplanets and supernovae to monitoring our changing climate.