Graduate Student News

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The Planetary Science Institute has selected University of Arizona graduate student Namya Baijal as one of two recipients of the 2025 of the 2025 Pierazzo International Student Travel Award. 

PSI established the award in memory of Senior Scientist Betty Pierazzo to support and encourage graduate students to build international collaborations and relationships in planetary science. Each awardee will receive a certificate and check for $2,000 at their respective conferences. 

Baijal will attend the Europlanet Science Congress – Division of Planetary Sciences Joint Meeting 2025 to be held in Helsinki, Finland from Sept. 7-12 where she will present her research titled “Three-dimensional Modelling of the Major Impact Craters on (16) Psyche.” Through her research, she works to understand how collisions have shaped the surface of asteroid (16) Psyche, a unique metal-rich asteroid in the main belt and the target of NASA’s Psyche Mission, set to arrive in 2029. Through impact modeling, she and her colleagues aim to help answer the mission’s central question: “Is Psyche the leftover core of a differentiated planetesimal, and if so, how did it form?” 

Pierazzo, after whom the prize is named, was an expert in the area of impact modeling throughout the solar system, as well as an expert on the astrobiological and environmental effects of impacts on Earth and Mars. In addition to her research, she was passionate about education, teaching and public outreach, developing planetary-related classroom materials, professional development workshops for teachers, and teaching college-level classes herself. Betty believed in the strength of broad collaborations in all of her research and education activities. 

This award memorializes the scope of how she lived her life and the good she sought to bring to our profession and communities.

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Madison is a third-year Ph.D. student in Geosciences, completing a graduate minor in Planetary Sciences. She is advised by Associate Professor Christopher Hamilton. Madison is interested in the active eruptions in Fagradalsfjall, Iceland, and how these eruptions can be used for hazard mitigation and planetary analogs.

Madison recently won four awards from the Dept. of Geosciences:

• Montgomery Associated Best Overall Talk: Observing the effects of complex topography on fissure-fed facies in the 2021-2023 Fagradalsfjall (Iceland) eruption series
• Bert S. Butler Scholarship
• Spencer R. Titley Graduate Scholarship
• John and Nancy Sumner Scholarship which Madison will use to travel to Italy to participate in a workshop focused on observing active volcanism at Mt. Etna and Stromboli and then to Geneva, Switzerland, to present her work at the IAVCEI (International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior) General Assembly.

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Nathan Hadland has been named an ARCS Scholar for the 2025-2026 academic year. The ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation advances science and technology in the United States by providing financial awards to academically outstanding students who are U.S. citizens studying to complete degrees in science, engineering, math, technology, and medical research. Scholars receive a cash stipend, full tuition, and a travel grant.

Nathan’s research focuses on microbial life in volcanic environments as an analog for life on Mars. He is a fifth-year graduate student advised by Associate Professor Solange Duhamel (MCB) and Associate Professor Christopher Hamilton.

The Curson Education Plus Fund in Planetary Sciences and LPL was established by Shirley Curson, a generous donor and friend of LPL, for the purpose of supporting travel expenses outside the state of Arizona during summer break. The award is open to students in the Department of Planetary Sciences and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who propose to fund study, museum visits, special exhibits, seminars, instruction, competitions, research and other endeavors that are beyond those provided by the normal campus environment and are not part of the student’s regular curriculum during the recipient’s school year.

To donate to the Curson Travel fund, visit the University of Arizona Foundation.

Advisor: Ilaria Pascucci
ESO RAVEYSO Conference, Garching, Germany

Presenting: The role of accretion and ejection variability in the evolution of young stars and their disks.

Advisor: Tom Zega
Canadian Center for Electron Microscopy Summer School, Hamilton, Ontario

Attending practical training and lectures in data processing and operation of telescopes.

Lori Huseby
Advisor: Mark Marley
ExoSLAM Summer School and Exoclimes VII conference, Montreal, Quebec

Presenting research on exoplanet hazes

Previous Curson Award Recipients

Congratulations to LPL's 2025 Galileo Circle Scholarship recipients: Roberto Aguilar, Arin Avsar, Naman Bajaj, Orion Hon, Devin Hoover, Lori Huseby, Beau Prince, Anna Taylor, and Chengyan Xie.

Galileo Circle Scholarships are awarded to the University of Arizona's finest science students and represent the tremendous breadth of research interests in the University of Arizona College of Science. The scholarships are supported through the generous donations of Galileo Circle members. Galileo Circle Scholars receive $1,000 and the opportunity to introduce themselves and their research to the Galileo Circle patrons.

Roberto Aguilar
Advisor: Jack Holt

Studying the interior of Martian mid-latitude glaciers with data from the SHARAD sounder and leading the development of a state-of-the-art drone-based ground penetrating radar to retrieve shallow subsurface structures in Mars-analog glaciers.

Arin Avsar
Advisor: Daniel Apai

Seeking to understand catastrophic collisions between planetesimals, which is the main dynamical process that governs the evolution of debris disks and developing a model that evolves the remnants of planetesimal collisions to determine the ideal disk orientation, stellar type, and observatory to detect such collisions.

Naman Bajaj
Advisor: Ilaria Pascucci

Using the James Webb Space Telescope to study the disks of dust and gas around distant stars where planets are just starting to form.

Orion Hon
Advisor: Lynn Carter

Investigating volcanic environments on Earth that are analogous to lunar volcanic terrains using geophysical instruments that can be employed by future robotic or human explorers on the Moon. These techniques allow exploration of the lunar subsurface, which is key to revealing volcanic landforms and resources that have been buried by billions of years of geologic evolution.

Devin Hoover
Advisor: Tommi Koskinen

Pursuing a comprehensive investigation of the atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan, using an unexplored dataset from the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph instrument that flew on the Cassini spacecraft. This work is the first step towards combining data from multiple Cassini instruments to create a detailed, global view of Titan's atmosphere.

Lori Huseby
Advisor: Mark Marley

Conducting laboratory studies in exoplanet haze chemistry to better understand how laboratory work can shape and constrain current modeling efforts and future telescopic observations of exoplanets.

Beau Prince
Advisor: Tom Zega

Using transmission electron microscopy to study the mineralogy of OSIRIS-REx sample returns at the nanometer scale to learn about the interior of asteroid Bennu's parent body.

Anna Taylor
Advisor: Tommi Koskinen

Studying the evolution of exoplanetary atmospheres and their interactions with their host stars, with a research focus on atmospheric escape, a crucial process that shapes planetary atmospheres over time, influencing their composition, structure, and potential habitability. The integration of theoretical hydrodynamic models with observational data aims to refine our understanding of how escaping atmospheres are detected through spectral features.

Chengyan Xie
Advisor: Ilaria Pascucci

Using the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate the chemical composition of the inner regions of protoplanetary disks where habitable zones are situated and mining older data sets to characterize the chemical compositions of aging disks, compare them with younger samples, and map evolutionary trends. This work will ultimately advance our understanding of how planetary systems emerge over time.

View all PTYS Galileo Circle Scholarship Recipients

Chaucer Langbert won this year’s Graduate Teaching Assistant Excellence Award for their support of PTYS/ASTR 170A1 Alien Earths with instructor Dr. Joe Schools during the Fall 2024 semester.

Chaucer was the sole teaching assistant for this writing-intensive class, providing accurate yet encouraging grading for 50+ essays on a weekly basis, in addition to a final project consisting of a 10-minute video. Chaucer made what was best for the student a priority, including providing for revisions of all rather than just a few of the essays.

Chaucer created their own course material and taught portions of the course based on their expertise in climate cycling and exoplanets. They attended all lectures and participated in both in-class and after-class discussions with students. Chaucer’s efforts were acknowledged in the student evaluations, which were uniformly excellent.

The GTA Excellence award provides $1,000 in support of conference and research travel.

The Graduate Teaching Assistant Excellence Award is an LPL initiative which is intended to promote, recognize, and reward exemplary performance among graduate teaching assistants assigned to PTYS undergraduate courses. The award consists of funding intended to be used toward travel and expenses to professional meeting chosen by the recipient. All graduate teaching assistants assigned to PTYS courses are eligible, whether or not their home department is PTYS.

Previous Leif Andersson Award Recipients

Mackenzie Mills is the 2025 recipient of the Gerard P. Kuiper Memorial Award, which recognizes excellence in academics and research. She defended her dissertation, Evolutionary Landscapes and Resurfacing Processes of Planetary Surfaces in Fall 2024. Her advisor was Regents Professor Alfred McEwen. She is currently a Physical Scientist working at the U.S.G.S. Washington Water Science Center in Tacoma, Washington.

Despite spending her first LPL year entirely remote due to COVID and having to relinquish a Fulbright Scholar project, Mackenzie completed her degree in just over four years. While at LPL, she won a NASA FINESST grant and two Galileo Circle awards and made substantial contributions to research about Mars and icy moons, pursing a broad range of techniques, including analysis of remote sensing data, modeling, and field work. 

In her student career as a graduate student, Mackenzie made important contributions to research, teaching, and innovation. She collaborated successfully with multiple scientists at JPL, U of A, U.S.G.S., and the University of Bern. She demonstrated her leadership skills as President of the Alpha Kappa Chapter of Sigma Gamma Epsilon. Mackenzie also tutored students and mentored secondary school students in Baltimore and Tucson and has mentored visually-impaired middle and high school students through the U of A initiative, Project POEM. Also while a student, she participated in science outreach by giving talks to local astronomy groups. 

Mackenzie published four first-author papers while a graduate student at LPL. In the first, she mapped a region around the Tianwen-1 landing site and Zhurong rover in Utopia Planitia, Mars. The mapping established extensive resurfacing by flows, most likely of igneous or sedimentary (mud flow) origin. Mackenzie presented results at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in 2023. The study of rift zones and resurfacing on Mars was an outgrowth of a summer internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The second paper topic also grew from her JPL research about moonquake-induced mass wasting of icy satellites and resulted in a NASA press release. The paper’s hypothesis that seismically-induced mass wasting creates smooth (at the 100-m scale) plains will be tested by high-resolution (to 0.5 m/pixel) images and topography from Europa Clipper. For her third paper, Mackenzie manually mapped the distribution of pitted cones in Utopia Planitia (Mars). And in a fourth paper, Mackenzie used machine learning to map pitted cones over all of Mars, creating global maps of pitted cones and indicating that >90% are over the Vastitas Borealis formation. Results support the case for lowland pitted cones as mud (not magmatic) volcanoes. 

The Gerard P. Kuiper Memorial Award is presented to students who best exemplify, through the high quality of their research and the excellence of their scholastic achievements, the goals and standards established and maintained by Gerard P. Kuiper, founder of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. To support students with the Kuiper Award, visit the University of Arizona Foundation.

Previous Kuiper Award Recipients