Fall

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.”

Dr. James Keane (2017) was awarded the The Harold C. Urey Prize, which recognizes and encourages outstanding achievements in planetary science by an early-career scientist. He distinguished himself with his broad and impactful research portfolio studying the geophysics of worlds across the Solar System, including the Moon, Io, Arrokoth, Pluto, and Enceladus.

Dr. Keane is also an accomplished science illustrator and communicator who has improved the accessibility of planetary science to not only the scientific community, but the general public. He has a record of community service and outreach serving as a member of DPS, AAS Committee on the Status of Women, and multiple other scientific organizations and groups. James is a mentor to graduate students at Caltech, Purdue, and University of Arizona.

James is a planetary scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He studies the interactions between orbital dynamics, rotational dynamics, and geologic processes on rocky and icy worlds using theoretical models and the analysis of spacecraft-derived datasets. These techniques facilitate his investigation of the dynamics, structure, origin, and evolution of solar system bodies. James has experience with NASA missions including GRAIL, Juno, and New Horizons.

LPL alumna Dr. Faith Vilas (1984) was awarded the 2025 Gerard P. Kuiper Prize by the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. This prize recognizes and honors outstanding contributors to planetary science. Past recipients include geologist Eugene Shoemaker, who co-discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, and astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. University of Arizona Professor Emeritus William Hubbard and Regents Professor Emeritus Donald Hunten have also received this prestigious award.

The DPS commends Vilas’ distinguished career of groundbreaking research and wide-anging innovations. She has made outstanding contributions to planetary science across a range of diverse topics. She has pioneered remote sensing of the Solar System, pushing capabilities through instrument design and expert observations of a variety of targets. Vilas designed the coronagraph used to acquire the first image of a circumstellar disk around another star and made the first asteroid survey using a CCD spectrograph, an instrument for measuring the intensity of light at different wavelengths. She made pioneering observations of aqueous alteration on primitive asteroids, the mineralogy of Mercury and hydration on the Moon.

The DPS presented Vilas with her award at the 2025 EPSC-DPS meeting, held in Helsinki, Finland on Sept. 11, where she gave the keynote speech.

“I’ve been in planetary sciences for 50 years. When I began, humankind’s first space probes were passing planets in our Solar System for the first time,” she said. “Now we study samples of material returned from the surfaces of asteroids to the Earth and determine the compositions of atmospheres of planets around other stars. Our scientific growth has been extraordinary.”

Her service to and leadership of the community have been extraordinary, according to the DPS commendation, including her roles as Program Director for Planetary Astronomy at the National Science Foundation; Chief Scientist of the NASA Planetary Data System; inaugural NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group Chair; Chair of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences; NASA Discovery Program Scientist; and Vice-Chair and Chair of the Detection and Characterization Sub-Committee on National Academies’ 2010 study on near-Earth object detection, characterization, mitigation. She was the Director of the Multiple Mirror Telescope, or MMT, observatory from 2005-2010 and has been involved in missions such as MESSENGER – short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging – at Mercury and Hayabusa at the asteroid Itokawa. Furthermore, she currently serves as the inaugural Editor of the AAS Planetary Science Journal. The impact of exceptional planetary science contributions enabled by Vilas’ work in these areas cannot be overstated.

The DPS, founded in 1968, is the largest special-interest Division of the AAS. The AAS, established in 1899, is the major organization of professional astronomers in North America.