Gay Jane Perez

Featured on August 16, 2026

This week we’re excited to welcome Pinoy Scientist Dr. Gay Jane Perez, the Acting Director General of the Philippines Space Agency. She will be sharing her journey to become a scientist and a bit about her own life and work.

But first, did you know that the 4th Philippine Space Week has just concluded, and the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) just celebrated its 7th anniversary?

Dr. Gay is a physicist, a professor, and currently the Acting Director General of Philippine Space Agency While she may be working with PhilSA now, she didn’t start with space.

Dr. Gay started with Physics studying Applied Physics at University of the Philippines Diliman where she then pursued her MS and PhD in Physics. Her early research was actually very far from space. She was interested in how crowds behave, particularly during emergency evacuation.

Eventually, her work led her to using satellite remote sensing to understand the interactions between the climate and the environment. She had the opportunity to do postdoctoral research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and later became part of the team behind Diwata-1 and Diwata-2.

Those experiences changed how Dr. Gay looked at space. She learned that space is not only about rockets, satellites, or what happens above the Earth. A lot of what is done in space is actually about understanding what is happening here on Earth.

Nowadays, one of the things she cares most about is finding ways to use space science and technology to help address some of the most pressing challenges that the country faces, from food security and disaster resilience to environmental monitoring and climate action.

So this week, she’d like to share a little bit about her journey, what she’s learned along the way, and why she believes space science and technology can be useful to the Philippines.

Some fun facts about Dr. Gay:

• Her PhD research was not about satellites.
• Some of her earlier research involved experiments with mice.
• She eventually went from studying how people behave in confined spaces to observing the Earth from space.