Kana Ishimaru

Kana is a PhD student at the Department of Planetary Science, and currently working on asteroid Bennu's geomorphology for the OSIRIS-REx mission. She was born in Ehime, Japan, and moved around frequently with her family in and outside the country until she came back to Ehime for junior high school and high school. She received a bachelor's degree in Earth and Planetary Environmental Science at the University of Tokyo. She worked on laboratory experiments and her undergraduate thesis was on dehydration and recrystallization kinetics of serpentine. During her degree, she also had internships at JAXA to model carbon cycle on Earth-like planets, and at LPL to investigate Cr abundance in olivine grains in chondrites. Kana's interests are primarily in asteroid studies varying widely from sample analysis to image processing, as well as space exploration mission development.