Department News

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By Joe Schools. Photos courtesy 

This spring the graduate field trip focused on the volcanic processes in Southeast Arizona with stops in and around Chiricahua National Monument and the Clifton-Morenci Mine.

We departed from Tucson Friday morning, stopping to learn about the intrusive silicate volcanism of the region and to hunt for some clay dunes in Wilcox Playa. That afternoon we arrived in Chiricahua National Monument. We learned about the ecology and biology of the monument, went searching (unsuccessfully) for coatis, and avoided (successfully) any jaguars or mountain lions. After learning a bit of indigenous history of the region at the visitor center, we gazed upon some of the famous rock spires of the monument and made camp for the night. We took advantage of the dark skies and gazed upon Jupiter and its moons through one of the department telescopes.

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Bright and early Saturday morning we departed camp for the trailhead to hike through the volcanic wonderland of silicic igneous rocks. Along the way we learned about the processes that create, erode, and destroy these hoodoos, also called rock spires. We departed the national monument that afternoon heading north, making a pit stop in New Mexico to learn about paleolake Animas. We decimated whole populations of insects as we drove to our campsite in the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area. We once again took advantage of the dark skies and used the telescope to observe the shadowed craters on the crescent moon. Some of the students used a UV flashlight around camp and were horrified to learn just how many scorpions live around us in Arizona.

Sunday morning, we explored more of the volcanic outcrops of Southeast Arizona. We then made our way up to the Clifton-Morenci Mine to gaze upon man’s destructive nature and learn about one of the largest copper deposits in the United States. We departed the mine and made our way back to Tucson, where the students unloaded the vehicles and organized the equipment in record time.

This trip was led by Research Scientist Joe Schools, assisted by Associate Professor Jessica Barnes and Research Scientist Sam Crossley. The graduate student class consisted of Elana Alevy, Maddy Christensen, Sophie Clark, Ruby Fulford, Carson Fuls, Gabriel Gowman, Kylie Hall, Joanna Hardesty, Lori Huseby, Melissa Kontogiannis, Chaucer Langbert, Cole Meyer, Carter Mucha, Fuda Nguyen, Lily Robinthal, Anna Taylor, and Madison Tuohy.

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Support the LPL Graduate Field Trip by donating to the Wilkening-Sill endowment.  

We are thrilled to announce the establishment of the Dr. Gordon Bjoraker Graduate Student Award. Dr. Bjoraker (or  “Gordy” to his many friends and colleagues) is an LPL alumnus (1985) who specialized in the study of the atmospheres of giant planets and brown dwarfs and made many scientific contributions through James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and ground-based observations during his 39-year career at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The Bjoraker Award is aimed at helping LPL graduate students who are recognized with external fellowships, grants, or awards that may not fully cover their graduate expenses. Award funds will be dispersed to help make sure that such excellent students are not placed at a disadvantage by winning an external recognition. We thank Gordy for his exceptional generosity and support of LPL students in the establishment of this new award.

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By Joe Schools and Jack Holt

Twenty-one LPL graduate students enjoyed three days in beautiful Owens Valley, California. This trip was a ten-and-a-half-hour drive both to and from the site. It was one of the longest drives that LPL students have done to get to a field trip location. Faculty and staff on the trip included Jack Holt, Lynn Carter, Stefano Nerozzi, and Joe Schools as part of the PTYS 590 Planetary Geology Field Studies course.

Activities included exploring the relatively young volcanic terrains associated with the Long Valley Caldera. We stood in the main caldera which formed in a supereruption event ~760,000 years ago. We also explored a lava tube in a ~50,000 year old volcanic field, and hiked around Panum Crater, a rhyolite dome which erupted only 600-700 years ago. Magma likely still exists at depth beneath where we were standing, as evidenced by the active hot springs which were shut down for being too hot.

The students also learned about the glacial processes which carved out the mountains of the area, discovered the history of the California Water Wars, and hunted for trilobites in the ancient White-Inyo mountains.

Everything went absolutely smoothly, and there were no vehicle-rock incidents. For anyone who did not get to experience the field trip, we brought a bit of Owens Valley home with us in the form of the mantle xenolith sample currently outside the Kuiper building. If you get a chance to stop by and see it, note the clusters of green olivine, that’s the mantle!

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Some of the PTYS 590 field trip students were also enrolled in PTYS 549, Radar Remote Sensing. Radar activities for that class were conducted in collaboration with a University of California Los Angeles group led by Professors Dave Paige and Mackenzie Day, who met us in the field along with some of their colleagues and graduate students. This joint effort focused on planetary analog features at three localities that overlapped with the PTYS 590 itinerary, including aeolian bedforms in volcanic cinder deposits at Fossil Falls, a rock glacier at a 9,000 foot elevation in the Eastern Sierras near Bishop, California, and ash fall deposits adjacent to Mono Lake. Students ran ground-penetrating radar on the surface to compare with drone-based radar sounding, complemented by drone-based LiDAR mapping and photogrammetry of the surface.

Support the LPL Graduate Field Trip by donating to the Wilkening-Sill endowment.

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The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory welcomed 5 new graduate students in Fall 2025.

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Chase Cooper

Chase is majoring in Astronomy with minors in Astrobiology and Mathematics. Chase is fascinated by the concept of alien life and is excited that he can be a part of the search. He really likes that astrobiology brings together relevant knowledge from diverse fields.

Chase is currently enrolled in his favorite astrobiology course, MCB 437, Life in Extreme Environments with Associate Professor Solange Duhamel. This class focuses on how current life on Earth has adapted to conditions that are considered extreme, such as high heat or extreme pressures on the sea floor. Chase has enjoyed learning how it is not only important to consider what kinds of life we could find beyond Earth, but it is also an opportunity to appreciate how diverse, adaptable, and weird our own planet is.

Chase has goals to become a researcher and teacher. He would like to be a professor so that he can continue conducting groundbreaking research and sharing those findings with others.

For the last 18 months, Chase has been working with LPL Associate Professor Tyler Robinson. He has been studying the phase curves of Titan and Earth, particularly how their atmospheres and oceans impact their brightness. This is impactful in designing and building future telescopes that can look for signs of habitability. Chase has also been working on another research project with LPL Assistant Professor Sukrit Ranjan to model biosignature gasses in Earth-like exoplanets.

When Chase is not working on school or research, he enjoys cooking, coding, and video games.

Benjamin Bucey

Benjamin is a Geosciences major with a Earth, Oceans, and Climate emphasis. He has minors in Planetary Sciences and French. Benjamin found he was really interested in the large-scale processes that led to the formation of planets so he began looking at minors that would allow him to study those processes. The planetary sciences minor looked like it might be a good fit, but did not add the minor until he saw that Dynamic Meteorology, which sounded especially interesting, was part of the program. His passion for planetary science led him to switch his major to Geosciences, which has allowed him to study planetary processes on Earth and the planetary sciences minor has given him the opportunity to study processes on other planets and the processes that lead to the formation of planetary systems.

Benjamin’s favorite planetary science class has been PTYS 450, Origin of the Solar System and Other Planetary Systems, taught by LPL Professor Ilaria Pascucci. It was the first class in which Benjamin studied the complex processes behind the formation of galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, planetary nebulae, planetary disks, solar systems and their components. It was all new material, so he really got a lot out of the class. This course changed the way he looks at the world and the universe.

Benjamin is currently working with Professor Jianjun Yin from Geosciences to study how sea level rise rates have changed and how they may be related to increased coastal flooding rates on the East Coast of the United States. He is using Python to conduct spectral analysis on East Coast sea level data to understand the periodicity of sea level rise rates and comparing results to spectral analysis data of AMO and Niño3.4 sea level anomaly data to determine how these processes impact the current East Coast sea level.

Benjamin is applying to graduate schools to study environmental policy and management. He has spent his undergraduate career learning about the formation of planets and their processes. He has realized how complex but fragile these processes are and how important they are to us if we want to continue living comfortably on Earth. This inspired him to pursue a career in environmental policy where he can work to protect these systems.

When Benjamin is not in class or working on research, he enjoys playing the piano, drawing, and hiking.

Lynn Lane first came to work at the University of Arizona in 1973 and joined LPL in 1978, supporting Laurel Wilkening and Mike Drake. She became the Director’s Assistant when Laurel became LPL Director in 1981. Over the years Lynn served in a variety of roles supporting our operations before she was promoted by Mike to the role of Business Manager, a position in which she excelled for over 20 years. As Business Manager Lynn oversaw all the financial and administrative activities of our program, expertly supporting everything from the smallest personnel decisions to the largest space mission financial complexities. She is particularly proud that there was never an audit finding against LPL during her tenure. Everyone who has worked, held a grant, or studied at LPL for the past fifty years was in some way supported by Lynn. In retirement she plans to travel, enjoy her family, and spend more time in her beloved Greer, Arizona.

Mary Guerrieri first arrived at the University of Arizona as an undergraduate in 1984. She joined LPL as a student assistant in the LPL library (working with Jen Chapman) in 1988 and was then hired in 1989 by Tom Gehrels and Mildred Matthews to work as an editor with the University of Arizona Press Space Science Series where she managed the transition to using TeX to prepare camera-ready manuscripts. After completing an M.S. in Library Science, she was hired in 1993 as the Data Manager for the Space Imagery Center (Bob Strom, Director). Her first task was to re-locate and organize the archive from storage into the new SIC space. She also supported the Space Science Series as an editorial consultant and was given cover recognition as an Editor of the volume Resources of Near-Earth Space. Mary later worked with Journalism and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences where she focused on faculty and student affairs, including special projects, curricular affairs, and student financials. Mary returned to LPL in 2007 as Manager of Academic Affairs for the Department of Planetary Sciences. In this role Mary supported faculty meetings, tenure and promotion packages, classroom scheduling, colloquia, public lectures, special events, and a myriad of other aspects of behind-the-scenes tasks that enabled every aspect of our academic enterprise. In retirement Mary is helping organize the LPL historical archives, organizing everything from important internal reports from the 1970s to stray negatives from the Rectified Lunar Atlas. Mary also plans to travel and continue her volunteer passion of supporting and fostering dogs from Tucson animal shelters.

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Assistant Professor Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina is the invited Fred Kavli Plenary Lecturer at the American Astronomical Society’s 247th meeting in Phoenix, Arizona in January 2026. Each year the AAS Vice Presidents name a special invited lecturer to kick off each AAS meeting with a presentation on recent research of great importance.

Dr. DellaGiustina was invited to deliver the lecture in her role as Deputy Principal Investigator of the OSIRIS-REx sample-return mission. The mission team is commended “for providing groundbreaking insights into the origins of the Earth and other solar system bodies via the significant achievement of successful sample return from the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu.”