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An inspiring physics teacher, a lesson on the Copernican Revolution, and an immense awe sparked by the night sky ignited a passion for learning and research for Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Dr. Zurbuchen shares...

Louise Prockter knows a thing or two about logistics and planning. When the first image of the unseen hemisphere of Mercury popped onto the screen during a flyby mission, her first thought was, "oh thank God, it's in the middle...

Jeremy Werdell, an Oceanographer in the Ocean Ecology Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, discusses his lifelong passion for studying the ocean, which started with a school field trip to a marine biology lab. He describes how happening to...

Rosaly Lopes is a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. She discovered seventy-one new volcanoes on IO, for which she was recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records. She uses her research into the surface of other planets...

Bruce Wielicki, a NASA Langley climate scientist, discusses his collaboration with economists to help non-scientists understand how climate change will hit them in the wallet, and how they could reduce that risk with modest investments in improved climate science. He...

Kathy Cashman, professor at the University of Bristol, worked on the 1980 eruption at Mount St. Helen’s in Washington, one of the first monitored volcanic eruptions in the world (“it was a ‘who’s who’ of volcanology and geology”). Thanks to...

Glenn Orton is so deep in Jupiter mission information that he gets envious when he’s not involved in a space project studying the gas giant. The senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory studies the composition and structure...

On the football field, Bob Swap learned to read the field, look at the play, assess the information, and move forward. Today, those same skills help him manage over 250 scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center with NASA’s Pandora...

By his own count, Chuck McClain has had six mentors in his career. His first may have been a teacher in Kansas City who took him to his first physics demonstration. Since 1978, he’s worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight,...

When Quinyan Duan was a student in China, he found his way into hydropower engineering. He wanted to pursue a graduate degree but couldn’t find the right professor to guide him. He took the difficult step of applying in the...