Dr. Joel Joseph S. Marciano, Jr. was appointed as the first Director General of the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA), where he is now leading the buildup and mobilization of the newly created national government agency. He provides executive direction and supervision over the operations of the PhilSA and serves as the Presidential Adviser on Space Matters. He is also a Full Professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) where he held the Dado and Maria Banatao Professorial Chair.

Dr. Marciano obtained his BS Electrical Engineering from UPD and his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications from the University of New South Wales in Australia. He was the UP-Dado Banatao Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) in the University of California Berkeley and at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego (UCSD) in 2004 and 2005, respectively. In 2007 and 2009, he was a Visiting Associate Research Scientist in UCSD.

His stewardship of the PHL-Microsat and STAMINA4Space programs contributed to the timely completion, launch and operation of the microsatellites Diwata-1 and Diwata-2, nanosatellites Maya-1 and Maya-2, and has yielded 10 small satellites in various stages of development from 2014-2020. He also provided leadership and direction in establishing and developing ground station and mission control operations, data archiving and distribution, remote sensing and artificial intelligence processing on geospatial data, academic program development, local small satellite research and testing facilities, and local industry engagement in space technology.