Fall

Dante Lauretta

Regents Professor Dante Lauretta was named the recipient of the 2023 Eugene Shoemaker Lecture from the American Geophysical Union. The award is presented annually and recognizes excellence in planetary exploration. This lecture honors the life and work of planetary scientist and geologist, Eugene Merle Shoemaker.

Dante Lauretta is Principal Investigator for OSIRIS-REx, which returned to Earth its sample of the asteroid Bennu on Sept. 24. He presented the award lecture at the December 2023 AGU meeting.

Joe Giacalone

Professor Joe Giacalone was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, in recognition of seminal contributions to our understanding of charged particle acceleration and transport throughout the interplanetary medium. The AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to Earth and Space science.

Professor Giacalone is a member of the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun team on the Parker Solar Probe.

Joe Giacalone walks across AGU stage.

https://www.space.com/osiris-rex-apex-probe-sun-close-approach-asteroid

Assistant Professor Jessica Barnes is the recipient of the 2024 Curie Award. Sponsored by the UArizona College of Science Galileo Circle, the Curie Award recognizes early-career scientists who are advancing science with innovative work and also adding to the diversity within the scientific community. Professor Barnes strives to understand the origin and evolution of volatiles in the inner Solar System utilizing a combination of nano and microanalytical techniques to study mineralogy, geochemistry, and petrological histories of a wide range of extraterrestrial materials.

In 2023, Dr. Barnes received the 2023 Nier Prize, awarded to young scientists for outstanding research in meteoritics. She was selected by NASA in 2019 to study the previously unopened Apollo sample 71036 and received a $1.5M gift in support of the sample analysis. Also that year, Dr. Barnes was named by Nature magazine as one of five young scientists who will shape the next 50 years of Moon research. In 2020, NASA named her to the Early Career Award program. In 2022, Dr. Barnes was selected as a Woman of Impact by the UArizona Office of Research, Innovation & Impact.

Michael Hicks Mike earned his Ph.D. at LPL in 1997 with a dissertation titled, A Spectrophotometric Survey of Comets and Earth-Approaching Asteroids. He moved on to work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a postdoctoral research associate and then as research scientist from 1998 until 2022. His research specialty was the physical properties of comets and asteroids. He served on the science teams of the DART Project, the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) Project, the Dawn Mission, and the NASA Deep Space 1 Mission. He was the author of over 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Read the complete memorial from the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences.

David Grinspoon

David Grinspoon (1989) was appointed by NASA to be the Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy. He has been a frequent advisor to NASA on space exploration strategy, a long-time investigator for NASA-funded programs and a science team member on several active interplanetary spacecraft missions. Dr. Grinspoon is the former inaugural Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology (2012-2013). In 2022, he was appointed as a member of the NASA independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena and elected as a lifetime member of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.

Dale Cruikshank (1968) was awarded the 2023 Masursky Prize by the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Science (DPS) in recognition of his outstanding service to the planetary science community.

Dr. Cruikshank served as the first historian of the DPS until 2020; the position was created after he undertook efforts to document and preserve DPS history. He worked to build international bridges between scientists through outreach to USSR scientists during the Cold War and participation in the International Astronomical Union (IAU), including serving as President for IAU Commission 16. He was Associate Editor of Icarus and a member of multiple decadal studies in both Planetary Science and Astronomy. More about Dr. Cruikshank's career as an astronomer and planetary scientist is available from NASA.

Three members of the LPL faculty were on teams selected for the Scialog Signatures of Life in the Universe Collaborative Innovation Awards.

Christopher Hamilton, Sukrit Ranjan, and Tyler Robinson each received $50,000 in direct costs to support their research.

The Scialog project is sponsored by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Kavli Foundation, and NASA. Scialog seeks to stimulate interdisciplinary conversation and community building around an important scientific theme such as the search for life beyond Earth.

Christopher Hamilton