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Brian Day, of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Virtual Institute, leads a group of scientists in visualization and analysis of spacecraft data. Brian was taught that there’s no water on the moon, there’s no atmosphere on the moon, and the moon...

Elizabeth Rampe, a mineralogist, studying Mars at the NASA Johnson Space Center, shares about her life and work. She focuses on minerals on the surface of Mars which formed from water-rock interactions, which have the potential to show billions of...

Jacob Bleacher has spent a great deal of time preparing for Mars and the moon, even though he has never left the Earth’s orbit. The research scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center is currently on detail at NASA Headquarters as...

Michael Meyer, NASA's Chief Scientist for the Mars Exploration Program, talks about his life and work in science. As a teenager working as a deckhand on a treasure diving boat in Florida, he was hired to replace some fired divers...

Michael Freilich, Director of NASA's Earth Science Division, shares about his life studying the oceans and Earth as a system. While still in his high school's oceanography club, he started exploring a question about how waves move that later became...

Daniel Minguez, a geophysicist for Chevron, helps create new geologic models of the earth’s layers, trying “to build geologic stories for how different geologic elements got there.” Daniel discusses his work which focuses on boring techniques and navigating plate tectonics....

Lori Glaze, Acting Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, works with everything from understanding asteroid trajectories and material make up to the InSight mission which recently landed a rover on Mars. It’s no exaggeration to say Lori...

Steven Clarke, NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration, discusses his life in science and engineering. Currently tasked with bridging NASA's efforts on human and robotic missions to coordinate scientific requirements for going to the Moon and Mars, he has seen...

Doug Archer has a rock collection, only he’s never actually held any of the stones, and they are hundreds of millions of miles away on Mars. As a research scientist working with the Curiosity Mars rover in NASA’s Johnson Space...

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,...

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...

Having an idol is important in science so you can see yourself doing something similar. Gregory Cutter met his idol, Jacques Cousteau, when he was an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. As an oceanography professor, he worked with different...

Dawn Wright, ESRI and Mark Parsons, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, share with us their journeys into data mapping, and how the field has grown, including at AGU. Before AGU embraced mapping scientists, people were starting to leave AGU. Now, they’re back,...

Susan Bates has always been interested by the physical world and especially the ocean. She remembers standing on the beach as a kid in North Carolina wondering where the waves came from. Now, she gets to predict what the ocean...

Dr. Jim Green has spent 38 years of his life working at NASA. He started there with a fresh Ph.D. in Earth magnetospheric science and helped pioneer the magnetosphere research group at Marshall Space Flight Center. He spent 12 years...

Roberta Rudnick, Professor at University of California Santa Barbara, was captivated by science from a young age, witnessing the Mt. Saint Helens eruption while in college, and traveling the globe to understand plate tectonics, and how and why continents form...

David Crisp, senior research scientist at NASA, recounted his adventures, from going from a physics education major who had a paper on Venus winds published by Carl Sagan to a doctoral student at Princeton to helping fix Hubble. He described...

We won’t say how long Susan Lozier has been shaping young minds at Duke University (she may let it slip), but she talks about amazing changes that have happened during her tenure. She grew up wondering how rivers get polluted,...