Dr. Ellen Howell received a Ph.D. from LPL in December, 1995. She moved to Puerto Rico and worked as a post-doc in the Geology Department of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. She then spent 14 years at the Arecibo Observatory as a staff scientist. Ellen specializes in remote sensing of asteroids and comets, and combining different types of data at different wavelengths. She studies thermal properties of near-Earth asteroids, radar imaging, and compositional spectroscopy. She also studies the coma of comets at radio wavelengths, for which the Arecibo Observatory is especially well suited. Since returning to Tucson in August, she has been working on the OSIRIS-REx mission to Bennu, in the spectral analysis and imaging processing groups.

Dr. Michael Nolan returned to LPL in July as a Senior Research Scientist after twenty years at the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. After graduating with a Ph.D. from LPL in 1995, Mike joined Cornell University as a post-doctoral researcher at the Arecibo Observatory, and stayed at Arecibo in a number of scientific, technical, and management roles, including Observatory Director from 2008 to 2011. His research concentrates on the structure and evolution of asteroids and planetary surfaces using radar imaging and numerical simulation. At LPL, he will be the Asteroid Geophysical Scientist for the OSIRIS-REx project, and will continue remote sensing and modeling research on asteroids.