Spring
LPL graduate student Nathalia Vega won 3rd place in this year's UArizona Grad Slam Competition.
Grad Slam is a campus-wide competition for the best three-minute graduate student presentation of a research or creative project; it is sponsored by the UArizona Graduate Center. Nathalia's presentation was titled Unlocking Extremoverse: Behind the scenes of a Pokemon-inspired game.
LPL alumna Dr. Kelly Miller (2016) was selected as one of five NASA early-career scientists to be honored with a 2023 Planetary Science Early Career Award (ECA). The awards recognize demonstrated leadership, involvement in the planetary science community, and potential for future impact.
Dr. Miller is a Research Scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Her project, “Carbon-Based Connections: From Earth to the Outer Solar System,” will establish carbon-based connections across the solar system and will include outreach efforts with middle schools in San Antonio.
The NASA ECA program supports exceptional early-career scientists who play a meaningful role in the planetary science community to pursue professional development in areas relevant to NASA’s Planetary Science Division. The goal of each proposal is to identify a need in the community and propose a project to address that need. Each project is facilitated by a grant of up to $200,000 to each of the selected principal investigators.
The selected projects span the full breadth of planetary science research, and the principal investigators are based at U.S. universities and research institutes.
The University of Arizona Press has added 14 formerly out-of-print volumes of the Space Science Series to its open access platform, Open Arizona. The collection makes available again the work of leaders in the field, including Richard P. Binzel, Tom Gehrels, Mildred Shapley Matthews, and many others. These works provide an important archive of a pivotal time in several emerging fields connected to astronomy and the space sciences.
The series brings together the world’s top experts, who lay out their foundational research on current understandings, while also building frameworks for the highest-priority questions for the future. The books were originally published between 1976 and 2000. Since 2000, books in the Space Science Series have been produced in collaboration with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.
The Space Science Series volumes are available for download here.
Elijah Garcia is the recipient of the LPL Staff Excellence Award for 2024 in the category of Science/Engineering Staff.
Eli is Manager of Professor Walt Harris’ Optical and Space Flight Instrumentation Development Laboratory. He began his career at LPL as a student in 2016 and soon transitioned to being an essential member of the staff, maintaining a broad range of facilities including two vacuum test systems, a clean room, a darkroom, a mechanical shop, a compressed gas handling facility, chemical storage, and two electronics fabrication stations. He keeps facilities adequately supplied and maintained ensures that users are properly trained for safe use and have required certifications. Eli also serves as procurement lead for the funded research projects in the lab, including working with vendors to develop quotes for what are often highly customized components that will be incorporated into space flight hardware.
Eli is an active participant in the field component of the user groups’ research, essentially extending his expertise beyond the lab. He handles logistics of remote test and flight operations of experiments developed in the lab and assists investigators with all phases of their effort to obtain a successful test or launch, often requiring him to travel to remote locations for up to weeks at a time, during which he has remotely attended to his regular management duties.
Eli is adept at handling needs of multiple projects simultaneously, currently managing four projects with four principal investigators, diverse facility requirements, and a constantly changing set of students, postdocs, and engineers that he keeps certified and operating independently of each other. In addition, Eli takes an active role in mentoring undergraduate students in the lab, volunteering to train these students in lab best practices and routinely goes out of his way to research new and cost-effective solutions to problems that keep our project within budgetary and schedule bounds. Under Eli’s leadership, the lab cleanroom was recommissioned to meet specific program requirements — a success that was described as a “heroic effort.” Thanks, Eli, for your outstanding work in support of optical and spaceflight instrumentation development.