Dennis Tito

On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito made history by becoming the first individual to personally pay to travel in space. Launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Tito served as a crewmember of an eight-day Russian Soyuz taxi mission to the International Space Station. By fulfilling his 40-year dream to travel to space, Tito captured the imagination of millions of people worldwide and renewed interest in the United States space program .

Today, he is the Chief Executive Officer of Wilshire Associates Incorporated, a leading provider of investment management, consulting and technology services. Applying science to the art of money management, Tito and his team of 250 professionals utilize mathematical formulas to advise a wide variety of institutional and high net worth investors worldwide. Founded in 1972, Wilshire advises on about $1 trillion in assets, directly manages about $10 billion in assets, and provides analytical tools to some 350 institutions around the world

Tito holds a B.S. in Astronautics and Aeronautics from NYU College of Engineering and a M.S. from Rensselaer in Engineering Science. He began his career as an aerospace engineer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the age of 23. While serving at JPL, he was responsible for designing the trajectories for the Mariner spacecraft missions to Mars and Venus. Even though he left to pursue a career in investment management, he has always remained interested in and committed to the exploration of space.

Employing the same methodology he used to determine a spacecraft's path, Tito is credited with helping to develop the field of quantitative analytics that uses mathematical tools to analyze market risks. In 1974, Tito developed the Wilshire Total Market Index (The Wilshire 5000), the broadest stock market index that Federal Reserve officials cite as a barometer of the U.S. economy.

A philanthropist and civic leader, Tito supports and is actively involved in many charitable and civic causes including establishing the Dennis A. Tito Gene-Nutrient Interaction Laboratory at the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition. He formerly served as President of Commissioners for the Department of Water and Power of Los Angeles.