Graduate Student News

Chaucer Langbert

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.

Anna Taylor is the recipient of the 2025 Leif Erland Andersson Award for Service and Outreach.

Anna is a second-year student working with Associate Professor Tommi Koskinen. Her research interests include exoplanets and planetary atmospheres.

Despite being an early-career student, Anna has a long list of science outreach to her credit. Early in her student career, Anna volunteered with the U of A College of Science Brunch with Bennu event and has gone on to represent LPL at many other events, including the “STEAM Night and Star Party” at Esmond Station K-8 school, Arizona Sands Club Eclipse Viewing Event, and the Mica Mountain High School Computer Science night.

Anna often participates in community science outreach programs. She has served on a graduate panel at the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics and has given research career talks to the Women in Physics Club at North Carolina State University, the John T. Hoggard High School, and Tucson City High School.

Anna also ran the Exoplanet-James Webb Space Telescope station at the University of Arizona Foundation special event for the Old Main Society. She facilitated a field trip for a science class from Tucson City High School to come to visit LPL and learn about research at the department. She is actively participating in Arizona Science Center’s Girls Who STEM program where she mentors young girls through lab and science activities, helping them navigate uncertainties and self-doubt in STEM fields; she has mentored over 40 young women mentored to date. Anna also works with the STAR Labs Mentorship program, currently advising a high school student on a research project that focuses on the impact of possible planetary magnetic fields on the upper atmospheres of exoplanets.

The LPL Andersson Award for Service and Outreach is awarded annually to a PTYS graduate student in recognition for attention to broader impacts and involvement in activities outside of academic responsibilities that benefit the department, university, and the larger community. The award is named for Dr. Leif Andersson, a scientist who worked at LPL in the 1970s. Support the Andersson Award with a gift.

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

Fuda's award winning poster was titled, Are there polar vortices on ultracool atmospheres? The "best poster" award provided Fuda with the opportunity to present a talk on his research on brown dwarf variability, conducted with his advisor, Professor Daniel Apai. Fuda's excellent talk drew on solar system−brown dwarf synergies and harkens back to the work of LPL's Adam Showman.

First-year graduate student Christina Singh was awarded the Robin Fellowship by the University of Arizona College of Science. The fellowship is awarded for academic excellence, exceptional potential to advance knowledge in the discipline, and ability to broaden perspectives and inquiry based on life experiences.

Christina's research interests include astrobiology, photogrammetry, and planetary surfaces. Professor Shane Byrne is Christina's advisor.

Kiana presented her award talk, entitled Size and Albedo Constraints for (152830) Dinkinesh Using WISE Data, at the Fall 2023 meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists. Her presentation described work that was critical for helping the NASA Lucy mission plan their November 2023 encounter with this small main-belt asteroid.

Ph.D. candidate Samantha Moruzzi received a 2024 Amelia Earhart Fellowship from Zonta International; she is one of only thirty scholars selected for the honor, which recognizes outstanding academic record and demonstrated initiative, ambition, and commitment to pursuing a career in space sciences.

Samantha Moruzzi is developing geophysical models of impact basins in data-limited environments such as Pluto as windows into planetary interiors. She utilizes the topography data of the Sputnik impact basin and the widespread surface fractures returned from NASA’s New Horizons mission to understand the interior structure of Pluto, its formation and its geophysical evolution. The first part of her thesis showed that Sputnik basin’s topographic structure is morphologically and statistically consistent with large impact basins in inner solar system objects. This discovery has been a key study in understanding the universal processes governing impacts on rocky and icy solar system objects.

Samantha is currently generating a local gravity field over the Sputnik basin based on an approach that was once used to study the gravity signatures beneath Earth’s oceans. Her work has put constraints on surface properties and interior composition, calling into question whether Pluto has a subsurface ocean like other icy moons in the outer solar system.

After completing her Ph.D., she intends to pursue a postdoctoral position in geophysics and planetary science, pursuing a career as a research scientist at a NASA-funded research institution. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, reading and amateur astronomy.

Kayla Smith

Kayla Smith is the recipient of a University Fellows Award. This prestigious fellowship is offered to the University of Arizona's highest-ranked incoming graduate students and includes a competitive financial package, professional development, mentoring, and community engagement opportunities.

Kayla is a first-year graduate student; her research interests include astrobiology, exoplanets, and planetary atmospheres. Kayla's advisor is Professor Mark Marley.

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.

image with grad slam finalists.

Ruby Fulford will spend Summer 2024 at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where she will work with Dr. Bob Craddock on MARSSIM, a complex Martian landscape evolution model, to explore fluvial activity on pre-Noachian and early Noachian Mars.

Ruby is a first-year graduate student advised by Associate Professor Jeff Andrews-Hanna. Her research interests include astrobiology and planetary geophysics.

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