Stefano Casini is a Stardust-R ITN Early Stage Researcher at Hyperion Technologies BV and TU Delft, where he is also enrolled as a PhD student in the Space Engineering department. His current work involves the design and validation of autonomous navigation and AOCS systems for deep-space CubeSats. He obtained a BSc in Aerospace Engineering and then a MSc in Space and Astronautical Engineering with honors (cum laude), both from Sapienza University of Rome, from which he also received the 2019 excellent graduate award. He participated two times to the Erasmus+ program: first at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, during his 3rd BSc year and then at Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon, Portugal, during his 2nd MSc year. He has been an intern at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) both for his BSc and MSc thesis: the BSc thesis work focused on mapping and georeferencing lunar of landing sites for laser ranging purposes, while the MSc thesis work focused on the thermal analysis of a spherical laser ranged satellite. After his studies, he has been a post-graduate scholarship holder at INFN, where he continued his thermal analysis work in coupling with mechanical design and testing. He published two journal papers before Stardust-R: ‘A Preliminary Design of a Mission to Triton: A Concurrent Engineering Approach’ and ‘Thermal Influence of the Screw Axial Load on a 1-mm Accuracy Laser Ranged Satellite’, excerpt from the MSc thesis, first presented at the 15th PEGASUS conference. In the Stardust-R framework, he published the journal paper 'Novel 3U Stand-Alone CubeSat Architecture for Autonomous Near Earth Asteroid Fly-By'. In the spare time, he likes playing guitar, doing sports and (before pandemic) travelling with his camera.