Santana, Paola is a Dominican lawyer, public policy expert and entrepreneur who co-founded very ambitious company that plans to deliver packages using airborne drones. She is Co-founder and COO at Matternet, a Silicon Valley startup creating the world’s next generation transportation system using networks of flying vehicles. ^[1] Paola was born April 15, 1986, in the Dominican Republic.

Paola was born and raised in the capital city of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo. She went to a private elementary school and high school. She studied at one of the country’s best universities, Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, where she became a lawyer. In 2010 she received a Fulbright scholarship to attend George Washington University Law School and then another scholarship to attend Singularity University, NASA for a summer in 2011.

At the Singularity University, Santana and a group of young entrepreneurs were challenged to come up with ways to solve some of the world’s greatest issues, like alleviating poverty. It was there that she and three other scholars discussed the problem of road infrastructure in most developing countries of the world, and that’s when they came up with the Matternet vision. When asked how she came up with the idea for Matternet, she shares that she has always liked flying objects and used to dream of being an astronaut. She is currently living in Palo Alto, California but was recently in her home country as well as in Haiti testing out their new product.

At the young age of 27, Santana has already had a great deal of work experience in law. She has focused on designing strategic development plans for public agencies and on integrating technologies into E-Government, E-Democracy and E-Procurement platforms for the World Bank, the OECD, and Dominican governmental institutions. More specifically, she worked as a paralegal in the Dominican Republic for nearly two years and then worked as the Coordinator of the Dominican Chief Justice’s office for over three years. She was a legal consultant for OECD in France for six months as well as a legal consultant for the World Bank for three months. She is presently a Strategic Technical Advisor to the Chief Justice in the D.R. as well as the Head of Regulatory & Legal Affairs at Matternet.

She has received numerous scholarships and awards, most notably a Fulbright International Scholarship, Thomas Buergenthal Scholarship awarded by The George Washington University Law School and First Place for the Best Scientific Project based on Intelligent Energy Monitoring from Fulbright.

Paola speaks Spanish, English and French fluently and has an elementary level of Chinese and Portuguese. She is very passionate about government, entrepreneurship and local empowerment and is dedicated to government and political transformation.