Eliot Young is a Boulder-based planetary scientist and Senior Project Manager at  Southwest Research Institute. He has a physics degree from Amherst College, separate masters degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences from M.I.T., and an Sc.D. from M.I.T. in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. His areas of research include observing the atmospheres of Venus, Titan and Pluto, as well as developing telescopes and infrasound-sensing instrumentation for high altitude balloons. He has organized occultation observing campaigns on five continents. He has pioneered Fourier optics methods for analyzing occultation lightcurves. Eliot is a NASA participating scientist on the Akatsuki Venus mission and was a senior Fulbright fellow at the Observatoire de Paris/Meudon in 2010. Eliot is also a masters age class champion in alpine skiing and a race coach at Eldora Mountain Resort.