Spring

James Keane is the winner of the 2017 Pellas-Ryder Award for best student paper in planetary sciences. The award, administered by The Meteoritical Society and the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America, includes a cash stipend and certificate. The award citation reads: 

James Keane, PhD student at the University of Arizona, is jointly awarded the 2017 Pellas-Ryder award for his paper ‘Reorientation and faulting of Pluto due to volatile loading within Sputnik Planitia’ published in Nature in 2016. The research tests the hypothesis that the Sputnik Planitia impact basin region of Pluto has been infilled over millions of years by volatile ices, driving the reorientation of Pluto. Outcomes of the study indicate that there was feedback between the planet’s volatile cycle and rotational stability. The paper is an outstanding study utilizing newly available data from the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto. James, who is not a NH team member, conceived the study’s core research idea and undertook the true polar wonder calculations, mapping work and analysis, to test his hypothesis. The publication is clearly written and wonderfully illustrated, communicating complex geophysical calculations to a broad audience and laying down fundamental ideas for understanding the geological evolution of this newly explored Kuiper belt body.

James will receive the award at the Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Santa Fe, July 2017.

Molly Simon was awarded a 2017 University of Arizona/NASA Space Grant Fellowship for The Development and Validation of the Planet Formation Concept Inventory. The Fellowship includes a stipend, tuition and fee waiver, student health insurance, and a travel grant.

Congratulations to LPL alumnus Fred Ciesla (2003), who was recently promoted from Associate Professor to Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago.

 
 

Congratulations to Associate Professor Shane Byrne, who won second place for the 2017 Outstanding Faculty for Graduate and Professional Student Achievement Award, sponsored by the University of Arizona Graduate and Professional Student Council. The award is presented to faculty who have made outstanding efforts to mentor and advise graduate or professional students in their college or department; criteria include: creating opportunities for the graduate/professional students, faculty, and staff with whom they work to achieve excellence; demonstrating outstanding efforts of mentorship and develop mentees’ research and professional skills; mentoring a wide persity of students; assisting students to present and publish their work, to find financial aid, and to provide career guidance; offering psychological support, encouragement, and essential strategies for life in the scholarly community; demonstrating continued interest in the student's professional advancement.

Congratulations to the OSIRIS-REx project, named Arizonan of the Year by the Arizona Republic newspaper (Phoenix). Take a moment to read about Arizona's appreciation for "the glittering constellation of scientists, engineers and others who made this happen." 

 

 

It's been another busy semester for LPL'ers who reach out to share their work at local schools and community events, big and small. The spring outreach season opened in January with the extremely popular Connect2Stem event in Phoenix, on January 28. The month of March began with LPL students and staff talking with approximately 650 visitors to Science City at the Tucson Festival of Books and wrapped up with presentations about impact cratering and the scale of solar system objects at the Southern Arizona Research Science and Engineering Foundation (SARSEF) Future Innovators Night, held during their roughly week-long science fair for K-12 students. LPL hosted its annual visit from a group of Norwegian high school students and counselors. Students from Tucson's La Cima Middle School spent a "career shadow" day at LPL that featured a lecture about meteorites from Postdoctoral Research Associate Prajkta Mane, a tour of the new Transmission Electron Microscope, and the opportunity to talk with three PTYS graduate students to learn about graduate school and life as a graduate student. Other opportunites for outreach included talks and demonstrations at local schools. Space Drafts, Tucson's flavor of Astronomy on Tap, featured four LPL speakers for the 2016/2017 season (Bapst, Keane, Sutton, and Volk). Graduate student outreach coordinators Sarah Morrison and Shane Stone estimate that LPL staff and students met approximately 3,151 people during spring 2017 events.

The LPL table at Connect2Stem featured globes of Earth, the moon, Venus, Mars, Europa, and Pluto. Outreach volunteers discussed the different scales of these planetary bodies and Senior Research Specialist Dolores Hill conducted demonstrations of the OSIRIS-REx TAGSAM.
At Connect2Stem, LPL graduate student Sarah Morrison was interviewed by a meteorologist from a Phoenix news channel. 

Norwegian high school students spent the day with LPL research groups.

 

Amanda Stadermann is the recipient of the 2017 Curson Travel Scholarship. Amanda will attend the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI) conference to be held in Portland, Oregon, in August. Amanda, a first-year student working with Assistant Professor Christopher Hamilton, will present her research on the young lunar crater Giordano Bruno, with focus on its interior and exterior impact melt. The IAVCEI scientific assembly, Fostering Integrative Studies of Volcanism, is also an opportunity for Amanda to learn the most current methods for understanding terrestrial and planetary volcanism and to participate in discussions on igneous geochemistry and petrology.

We'll report on Amanda's travel and research in the LPL Fall Newsletter!

 

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