LEADERSHIP
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Santh Sathya Founder and CEO Santh Sathya founded LuftCar - an autonomous air and road mobility eVTOL mobility company in March 2021. He is also the CEO of LuftCar and serves on its board of directors. Santh deeply cares for environment sustainability and is a relentless innovator of technologies that solve complex problems, improve lives, build social equity and fuel progress. Before launching LuftCar, Santh served as the Director of Strategy for L3Harris, managing $ 2B P&L for the Sector CEO. Santh was head of systems engineering at Boeing - Insitu drones, and led Model Based Systems Engineering and digital twin development. He held a position as Vice President of Strategy for Johnson Controls joint venture in Asia Pacific, where he laid out a five year strategy for EVs, Electrification and Smart Cities, increasing revenue by 25% in energy and transportation markets. Santh managed operations for a $ 1B P&L at GE Energy, where he pioneered lean product development. Santh's greatest accomplishment was in developing and building 300 hydrogen fuel cell cars for Ford Motor Company. Santh has core expertise in hydrogen fuel cells, propulsion, AI architectures and lean start up. Santh has a MBA from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, MS in mechanical engineering from Ohio University and BS in Mechanical Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy. Santh also holds an Artificial Intelligence Strategy Certification from MIT. |
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Tiffany Nesbit
VP - Engineering Tiffany brings a strong background in engineering and product development. She has worked in the Aerospace and Defense space for 30+ years across military and commercial space systems, military and commercial aviation systems and defense targeting systems for air and ground vehicles. Tiffany spent much of her career with Honeywell Aerospace, leading both hardware and software development teams. During her tenure she spent four years in the Shanghai office providing technical coordination with local customers and development of Honeywell-Chinese joint ventures. For the last 8 years Tiffany worked as the Vice President of Engineering at Elbit Systems of America growing and maturing the engineering organization to enable organic product development. Tiffany holds a B.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech. |
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George Likourezos
VP - Growth Strategy George has over 25 years of experience representing startups, universities, research institutions, and corporate clients, including Fortune 100 companies, in intellectual property matters in fields including: aerospace, artificial intelligence, automotive, bioelectronics, biosensors, cybersecurity, digital health, electronics, electromechanical devices, medical devices, semiconductors, sensors, robotics, space technologies, telecommunications., and wearables. His legal experience includes representing clients in strategic patent portfolio development; licensing of IP assets; conducting due diligence investigations for patent acquisition and M&A transactions, landscape studies and "white space" analysis; rendering freedom to operate and other IP legal opinions; and representing clients in post grant reviews before the PTAB and the Federal Circuit. He also has experience in representing clients in trademark and copyright matters. Proficiency in leading projects and teams across multiple geographies and cultures. Offer unique combination of business acumen and expertise in IP protection. |
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Layne Merritt
VP - Defense Strategy and Government Relations Layne Merritt has 39 years as an aerospace professional. He started with 22 years as an Army helicopter and airplane pilot, conducting military operations worldwide. He was an experimental test pilot, leading the early work on what is now the CH-47F Chinook. Layne then worked as the Chief Engineer at PEO Aviation and then Chief Engineer and Deputy Director at the DEVCOM Aviation and Missile Center where he worked to connect technology to new military capability, notably the Joint Multirole Technology Demonstrators, Operations in Degraded Visual Environment and Launched Effects. After 34 with the Army, Layne joined industry where he worked as Chief Technology Officer at Elbit America and VP/GM of Airborne Systems at IntelliSense System, Inc. Layne has done extensive work internationally and with NATO. Layne will be create Defense opportunities for LuftCar with special focus on US and NATO military mission needs. |
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Doug Lampe
VP - Customer / Investor Relations and Digital Systems Doug Lampe is a member of our Executive Leadership Team at LuftCar. Doug puts his leadership qualities into marketing the LuftCar concept and building customer relations. Doug spent the previous six years with Deloitte Consulting as Vice President of Technical Architecture and Chief Architect leading multiple technology platforms. While serving with Deloitte, Mr. Lampe served as a leader within their Delivery Center practice through a time of growth from 400 to over 2,000 employees. Before joining Deloitte, Doug had a distinguished career at Lockheed Martin holding many technology-focused roles and leading teams performing both system integration and application development. His time at Lockheed provided insight into Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, Quality Management, Product Support, and Engineering. Doug’s leadership in the area of data analytics was instrumental in Lockheed Martin becoming the first Department of Defense contractor to win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Doug holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Florida and an M.S. in Engineering Management and Industrial Engineering from the University of Florida. He is also a graduate of Lockheed Martin's Operations Leadership Development Program. |
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Siddhart Sathya
Vehicle Autonomy and AI (Cofounding member) Siddhart is an energetic, innovative and imaginative leader with passion for Autonomy, AI Computer Science, Data Modeling and Visualization. During the founding of LuftCar, Siddhart played a major role in whetting the idea along with his dad Santh Sathya, who is the inventor of LuftCar concept. Siddhart was responsible for working on early business models for the company, demonstrating his entrepreneurial skills. Siddhart is now developing hydrogen production systems to support LuftCar hydrogen infrastructure. In the process, he has become conversant with 3D modeling and 3D visualization tools. Siddhart is now pursuing computer science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, while sharing LuftCar responsibilities. |
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Daphne Dixon
Business Development Consultant – Americas Daphne is responsible for growing markets, customer acquisition, government relations and community engagement in the United States. Daphne has over ten years of experience working directly with municipal and community decision makers. Through her work as Executive Director of Live Green, she has implemented several metric driven programs and initiatives that support the 17 Global Sustainable Development Goals. Daphne has received Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training as well as Transformational Facilitation and Coaching training. Her key strengths are community outreach, facilitating community engagement discussions, developing trusted relationships with municipalities, businesses and community leaders, sharing information about the air quality and workforce benefits of hydrogen and air mobility technologies, and developing customer and investor relations globally. Daphne .is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles |
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Gao Lio PhD
Technology Advisor He currently is the Lead for the group of Applied Energy Materials at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and his current research focuses on lithium battery R&D. He is the Principal Investigator in the U.S. DOE Battery for Advanced Transportation Technologies Program (BATT) and Solid-State Lighting Program (SSL). He also has been technical advisor and collaborator for General Motors, The Dow Chemical Company, 3M and many other leading global companies since 2001. His work has been published in Advanced Materials, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Natural Communications etc, and received national and international awards including R&D 100 Award in 2013, International Meeting on Lithium Batteries (IMLB) most excellent paper award, University of California discovery grant award, and lately FMC Scientific Achievement Award. Gao has a PhD in Chemistry from Michigan State University and B.Sc. in Chemistry from Peking University. |
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Saleem Ahmed
President - MENA region The Middle East especially UAE and KSA are attracting pioneers in the field of aviation, especially green aviation. In his role at LuftCar, Saleem is keen to create LuftCar partnership with Government bodies and the private sector in the Middle East to revolutionize transportation (in ways not thought possible) while contributing to a better and cleaner world. Saleem is responsible for strategic growth of LuftCar market in the Middle East and North African region. Saleem has an educational background in Mechanical Engineering and brings a wealth of experience spanning over 25 years in banking and FinTech from the Middle East. He understands the strategic aspirations of governments in the Middle East and is highly knowledgeable about AAM markets in the MENA region. |
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Justin Rajakumar Maria
Project Director Justin is a seasoned technology leader with over 25 years of progressive experience in the IT industry, specializing in DevOps, Engineering Management, Cloud Infrastructure, and Enterprise IT Strategy. His career began in 1996 with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, and he continued to evolve his technical foundation with a Master of Computer Applications (MCA) from Sikkim Manipal University in 2009. In pursuit of business and leadership excellence, he began an MBA program at Sikkim Manipal University in 2014 while advancing his executive role in the U.S. Currently serving as Director – IT/DevOps & Engineering at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield (USA)since June 2016, Justin leads enterprise-scale initiatives in cloud automation, DevSecOps transformations, and end-to-end IT modernization. He oversees multidisciplinary teams that build secure, scalable, and high-performance platforms that support both internal operations and customer-facing solutions. Prior to CareFirst, he held the role of Senior Technical DevOps Manager at Freddie Mac (via TCS) from January 2015 to June 2016, where he drove cloud migration strategy, CI/CD pipeline optimization, and compliance alignment for large-scale financial systems. From 2010 to 2014, Justin served as Principal Engineer (Senior DevOps Architect) at Hughes Systique Corporation / Hughes Network, USA, architecting robust DevOps ecosystems and automation strategies for telecommunications solutions. Earlier, at Indecomm Global Services Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, he held the position of Senior Development Manager from May 2005 to June 2010, where he successfully led engineering teams across multiple software products and agile delivery models. Justin’s deep technical acumen, combined with his leadership capabilities and international experience, makes him a transformative force in driving innovation, operational efficiency, and digital acceleration across enterprise environments. |
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