Dr. Mata is currently the Chief Technology Officer at SLS, a company founded in 2014 that specializes in state-of-the-art lightning protection, lightning transient monitoring, lightning location, lightning detection, lightning modeling, grounding, and lightning safety. Dr. Mata and his team have helped multiple government agencies and commercial companies with their lightning needs, including space ports, DoD facilities, power utilities, chemical plants, fuel storage facilities, manufacturing facilities, mines, etc. Dr. Mata has been the recipient of many awards. Among them, Dr. Mata was awarded the “NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest honor NASA awards to anyone who was not a government employee when the service was performed. The award is granted only to individuals whose distinguished accomplishments contributed substantially to the NASA mission. The contribution must be so extraordinary that other forms of recognition would be inadequate."