The Moon’s Water Cycle

William Misener is a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Earth and Planets Laboratory. An astrophysicist, he studies how exoplanets form, what they’re made of, and how they evolve. He is especially interested in the wide variety of small exoplanets and how they resemble and differ from the planets of our Solar System.

Alycia Weinberger is a staff scientist and associate director of Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory. Her research centers on planet formation, young stars, and exoplanets, which she studies using new observational methods on large ground- and space-based telescopes. She uses the Hubble Space Telescope to image the smallest dust grains in disks around young stars, and Carnegie’s Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to study how the elements and ices within those disks change. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology and is a fellow of the American Astronomical Society.

Jennifer Stern is a space scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She studies the chemistry of Mars’s atmosphere and surface and develops instruments that measure geochemistry on other planets. Her team built Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), an instrument on NASA’s Curiosity rover that heats rock samples in onboard ovens to analyze the molecules they release, and also measures the composition of the Martian atmosphere. Her honors include a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for her work on nitrogen on Mars, and Goddard’s Robert H. Goddard Award for the discovery of nitrate on Mars.

Shubham Kanodia is a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow. He led the study of TOI-5205 b, a so-called “forbidden” planet whose existence challenges current ideas about how planets form. His research focuses on giant planets orbiting M dwarfs, small, cool stars where massive planets stretch the limits of standard planet-formation theory.