Aarti Holla-Maini

Director

Aarti Holla-Maini is Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), based in Vienna. She was appointed by the UN Secretary-General in June 2023 and took up her post in September 2023, succeeding Simonetta Di Pippo. She has more than 25 years of professional experience in the space sector. She studied law at King's College London, including a period studying German law at the University of Passau, and qualified as a solicitor in 1995. For more than 18 years she was Secretary-General of the EMEA Satellite Operators Association, which became the Global Satellite Operators Association (GSOA) in 2021, and she helped expand it to represent global and regional operators. She was one of the architects of the Crisis Connectivity Charter, established in 2015 with the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster led by the UN World Food Programme. Before joining the United Nations she was Executive Vice-President for Sustainability, Policy & Impact at NorthStar Earth & Space.