Spring

Rachel defended her dissertation, Exoplanet Demographics Beyond Kepler: Giant Planets with Radial Velocity & Young Planets with TESS, on April 20. The thesis focuses on understanding how planets form and evolve by connecting the properties of their natal environment to the exoplanets discovered around mature stars. Rachel's dissertation work has so far resulted in two first-author papers, with another close to submission.

Rachel has been awarded the Penn State President's Postdoctoral Fellowship and was also named as a Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds Fellow at Penn State.

Galen Bergsten
Advisor: Ilaria Pascucci

Uses large-scale survey data to study populations of extrasolar planets, including those analogous to Earth, to learn how planets form and evolve throughout the Galaxy.

Xiaohang Chen
Advisor: Joe Giacalone

Seeks to understand the acceleration and transport of solar energetic particles (SEP) associated with fast and wide coronal mass ejections to better predict dangerous SEPs.

Nathan Hadland
Advisors: Solange Duhamel & Christopher Hamilton

Studies planetary analogs in Iceland and elsewhere to evaluate the nature of life and their resulting biosignatures in extreme environments that have similar characteristics as Mars.

Mackenzie Mills
Advisor: Alfred McEwen

Using spacecraft data to derive scientific conclusions from planetary surfaces, characterizing Martian geomorphology and working for an understanding of influence of Martian subsurface features on spatial distributions of surface features.

Lucas Smith
Advisor: Pierre Haenecour

Identifying and investigating presolar stardust grains within meteorites that have experienced aqueous processing, which informs our understanding of conditions that existed during Solar System formation.

Jada Walters
Advisor: Kris Klein

Investigating and identifying instabilities in solar wind plasma, modeling plasma instabilities in one and two dimensions to more accurately model the solar wind in three dimensions in advance of upcoming mission to explore near-Earth plasmas.

Zoë Wilbur
Advisor: Jessica Barnes

Investigating the volcanic and magmatic histories of Apollo 15 and 17 basalts using sample analysis, with a focus on a previously unopened Apollo 17 basalt sample. Measurements will help to answer key questions about how volcanism works on the Moon and potentially on other airless Solar System bodies. The sample analysis is particularly timely as the future NASA Artemis missions will include sample returns.

Adam Battle is the recipient of the 2023 LPL Leif Andersson Award for Service and Outreach.

Adam is a fourth-year graduate student who has demonstrated a commitment to service to his fellow graduate students and to the broader community since he joined LPL in 2019 and, in fact, even before beginning his graduate career.

As an undergraduate student, Adam supported his community as a volunteer at a food pantry and an ambassador for science, participating in activities like star parties and science fairs. As a graduate student, Adam has continued to encourage a passion for science and to support students in their career development.

In 2021, Adam worked with a Tucson Magnet High School student on a science fair project that collected data using the RAPTORS telescope on top of the Kuiper building. Adam wrote detailed manuals so that the student and their teacher could reduce the data on their own. The student won the Smithsonian Institution's Whipple Observatory Award at the Southern Arizona Research, Science and Engineering Foundation science fair and the student was invited to be the keynote speaker at the observatory's lecture series. And he has mentored two undergraduate students, one of which was accepted into a graduate planetary science program.

Adam's service to the department includes his work in organizing the annual Lunar and Planetary Lab Conference for 2020 and 2021. Adam was instrumental in pivoting the 2020 conference to a successful virtual meeting and returned in 2021 to support the in-person off-site conference. In his first semester at LPL, Adam volunteered as webmaster for The Art of Planetary Science (TAPS), a position he continues to hold. In that role, Adam saved the 2020 TAPS exhibit by working with the department webmaster to implement an online web gallery that made the program available to a global audience during the COVID-19 pandemic. His work as TAPS webmaster continues to support improvements to registration and archiving.

In addition to receiving the Andersson Award, Adam was the LPL nominee for the College of Science Graduate Excellence Award for Service. Adam's dedication to a service impact outside of his academic responsibilities embodies the spirit of the Andersson Award for Service.

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.

Patrick O'Brien earned his Ph.D. from LPL in December 2022 with a dissertation on The Rise and Fall of Lunar Topography, research which combined theoretical models, high-performance parallel computing, and planetary topography data from Mercury, Ceres, and the Moon. As a student, Patrick developed and combined models of landscape evolution, remote-sensing data processing techniques, and high-performance computing to devise novel approaches for advancing lunar science. In 2020, he developed a landscape evolution model of the lunar surface that answered questions about the rate of space weathering on the lunar surface. Patrick's research as to the source of topographic diffusion of the lunar landscape led to discoveries that updated the canonical model with findings describing diffusivity as both anomalous and non-linear, and that the smallest impactors control the impact-driven diffusion rate. Finally, during his graduate career, Patrick produced the most detailed maps of permanent shadow on the Moon and for the first time cataloged the locations of doubly permanently shadowed regions.

While at LPL, Patrick became known to the planetary science community by participating in opportunities like a JPL Planetary Science Summer School and attending Dawn spacecraft mission team meetings. Patrick presented his work at many professional meetings and participated in outreach events and university service projects like Project POEM, which seeks to foster interest in STEM careers for visually impaired middle and high school students. He acted as a mentor within the UArizona TIMESTEP program, which engages minority students in STEM research. He was also interested in student governance and served as the College of Science representative to the Graduate and Professional Student Council and as the student representative on the committee to select a new Dean for the College of Science.

Patrick is currently a Research Scientist with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, and a member of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Diviner team.

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.