Focus on Alumni

LPL alum Tom Jones flew as member for four Space Shuttle crews.

The name Barlow was officially adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for a prominent, ~87 km-diameter crater located in the northern portion of Sinai Planum (11.65°S, 270.09°E) on Mars. The name approval commemorates Dr. Nadine Barlow (1958–2020), noted leader in the field of Mars crater studies.

Dr. Ali Bramson, 2018 LPL Alum, receives 2024 Ronald Greeley Early Career Award in Planetary Sciences from the American Geophysical Union.

Dr. Tom Schad (2013) is first author of the study that promises to enhance our understanding of the Sun’s atmosphere and how its changing conditions lead to impacts on Earth’s technology-dependent society.

The Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society awarded Jamie Molaro (2015) the 2024 Carl Sagan Medal for outstanding communication by an active planetary scientist to the public.

Dr. Jamie Molaro (2015) is a Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute studying weathering and landscape evolution on airless icy and rocky bodies. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2015, she obtained a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she is geographically based.

LPL alumna Kelly Miller (2016) received a 2023 NASA Planetary Science Early Career Award in recognition of demonstrated leadership, involvement in the planetary science community, and potential for future impact.

LPL Alumna Ali Bramson (2018) is Co-Chair of the International Mars Ice Mapper Measurement Definition Team (I-MIM MDT) is a highly specialized group of scientists from around the world tasked with defining the measurements that a Mars mission with a new radar system aboard could achieve.

LPL alumna Joana Voigt (2022) and teams from the University of Arizona and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, combined images taken with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and measurements from ground-penetrating radar to recreate a 3D model of every individual lava flow they could detect evidence of in Elysium Planitia.

Joshua Lothringer (2019), assistant professor in the department of physics at Utah Valley University, helped discover the presence of carbon dioxide on an exoplanet 700 light years from Earth using the JWST.