Akhil is a Managing Partner and Chief Economist at Rational Futures. His career has spanned government, academia, and industry. He served as acting Chief Economist in NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, where he led agency-level market assessment, technoeconomic concept development, and benefit-cost analysis. He was an Economics professor at Middlebury College, where he taught courses in quantitative methods and applied resource and industrial economics, and led data science at Red9 Corporation, a technology startup focused on wearable motion sensors and machine learning. Akhil holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of California, Riverside and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Colorado Boulder.