Tara Kelly’s passion for space began as a kid at Space Camp, an early spark that never really left her, and one that eventually led her to Open Lunar, where she serves as Director of Development and Strategy. In that role, she sets the organization’s fundraising strategy and leads its execution end to end, spanning major donor cultivation, corporate partnerships, grants, board engagement, and organizational planning. She also helps evaluate and source new projects for Open Lunar and recruits the leading technical experts and company partners needed to help execute and scale their global impact. 

Tara’s career began at Goldman Sachs, before she went on to lead teams at Roubini Global Economics, where she helped Prof. Nouriel Roubini scale his macroeconomic research firm while managing the organization’s private equity and hedge fund relationships. She then moved to Bloomberg, where she led the research business within the firm’s Trading division. 

Over the past decade, Tara’s focus has been on helping leading academic and research institutions take their work beyond the lab: translating institutional IP into real world ventures, raising the capital to fund that translation, and introducing the strategic partners needed to carry it forward, including at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business and David Geffen School of Medicine. Most recently, she led the sourcing of strategic capital and country partnership relationships for space missions at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). 

Tara holds a BA in Business from the University of Miami and is an inaugural member of Harvard Business School’s DIALOGUE, an advisory community curated by the HBS Dean.