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Bärbel Hönisch, Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences at Columbia University also known as Queen of Boron, transported us millions of years beyond the ice cores to the realm when Greenland had no ice. She took hold of a magical instrument...

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...

Thomas Wagner, NASA's Program Scientist for the cryosphere, discusses how his life has developed to study the Arctic and Antarctic. Even though as a student he initially found himself bored by studying glaciology, he soon discovered a passion for polar...

How can scientists tell the story of science so that the public listens and understands? Dwayne Brown is the Senior Communication Officer for the Science Directorate at NASA and works with hundreds of scientists to communicate their ideas on television,...

Amber Soja’s career is on fire. The resident at NASA’s Langley Research Center studies fire regimes and how they are being affected by climate change. “Every fire season is worse,” she says, adding that the changing fire regime is proof...

Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discusses his career exploring the outer Solar System that started with the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions, and extended forward to Cassini and more recently Juno. Interested in space...

Kristen Erickson, Director of science engagements and partnership, recently helmed NASA’s efforts to involve over 154 million adult Americans with direct participation with the 2017 total eclipse – the largest engagement effort in NASA history. But in her more than...

Clouds are among the most unpredictable components of climate models. But Norman Loeb is working hard to sort out the shape of cloud patterns in order to improve the accuracy of long-term weather predictions. As far as understanding how all...

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...

Hal Maring once risked his life for a box of fog. The physical scientist at NASA Headquarters was once on a New Zealand research cruise in the Tasman Sea when the vessel hit bad weather. They took down some of...

Putting up tall PVC pipes with pointy sensors to measure electrical fields in an approaching lightning storm may seem reckless, but it’s all part of the job for Timothy Lang. The NASA research scientist spends a lot of time in...

For the last 14 years, Gari Mayberry has put her volcanology background to work as a disaster response coordinator at USAID. Disasters come in many shapes and sizes so that specialty is a start, but often Gari finds herself connecting...

George Huffman calls himself a classic weather person, in part because by the fourth grade in North Central Ohio, he already was excited about the prospect that you could make a job studying weather. At the NASA Goddard Space Flight...

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...

Jack Kaye, associate director for research at NASA's Earth Science Division, discuss his origins as a chemist and earth scientist, and how he was recruited to Goddard to be a chemist among meteorologists. "My boss would advertise me as his...

Dr. Claire Parkinson, senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center since 1978, discusses using satellite data to monitor sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic and serving as project scientist for the NASA satellite Aqua, which makes measurements of...

There’s a bit of a culture change moving from Ohio to New Hampshire, which Melanie Perello, Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, did as part of her studies. Would you be surprised that going from either to Tibet to study paleoclimate...

Sonia Esperanca, Program Director for the National Science Foundation, supports earth-science research in the academic community. She shares her journey from Rio de Janeiro to the United States, Israel, Australia, and elsewhere. Having an understanding of landscapes across the world...

Daniel Irwin’s first direct connection with NASA started in the small town of Flores in Guatemala. Amidst work dodging snakes and spiders in the jungle, he had a chance encounter with a researcher who handed him satellite mapping images of...

Jill Marshall, Assistant Professor of Geology at the University of Arkansas thought she was ready to go to college, but there she was on the campus of Boston University as a freshman overwhelmed by her surroundings and on shaky financial...

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...

James Famiglietti, hydrologist and Director of the Global Institute for Water Security, University of Saskatchewan, discusses his work with NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experience (GRACE) and the evolution of technology throughout his career including its impact on water security....

John Bolten doesn’t need to get his hands dirty to learn about crop yields. Using satellite images, the Associate Program Manager of Water Resources for the NASA Applied Sciences Program has worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to directly...

Laurie Cantillo, the Deputy Director of Communications and Education at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about her journey to become a science communicator. She developed an interest in science at an early age spending time in the outdoors with her...