Tag: epec_profiles

EPEC Profiles – Erica Luzzi

In this series from the EPEC Communication Working Group, we meet members of the Europlanet Early Career (EPEC) community and find out more about their experiences and aspirations.

Erica Luzzi is currently enrolled as PhD student at Jacobs University Bremen and her research project consists of geological mapping on Mars within the European PLANMAP consortium.

Part of her PhD project was also funded by ESA within the Analog1 experiment. The latter experience brought her on a field mission in Lanzarote (Canary Islands), where, together with ESA astronauts, a variety of experiments were performed to test tele-robotic future exploration of the Moon and Mars, remote sensing through UAVs, and other field analyses that the astronauts will perform in future missions of human exploration.

More recently, Erica took part in a further version of Analog1 in which the ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano was controlling a rover located on Earth from the International Space Station, testing future missions on the Moon, where a rover will be located on the Moon’s surface and the astronaut will drive it, sampling rocks, safely from orbit. In this experiment Erica was in the backroom and was part of the science team that suggested to the astronauts what samples to collect based on what they could see from the camera on board the rover.

Something that she really loves apart from her PhD, is her position as Teaching Assistant for the courses of Structural Geology and Sedimentology. This is her biggest dream: getting to pass the knowledge to younger generations in the same way her professors did with her. Caring, and also stimulating because learning has to be fun, has to be a nourishment for curiosity.

Recently, Erica won the Amelia Earhart Fellowship, a $10 000 award for women pursuing their PhD in Space Sciences, that will allow her to have a budget for field trips studying terrestrial analogues, for buying new equipment and for attending conferences.

In 2021 she will pursue her doctorate and will look for post-doc opportunities. Even though she is dreaming of coming back to her beloved country, Italy, she stays open to all possibilities and is ready to work hard to get a permanent position at a university where she will be able, one day, to teach and keep doing research on the Red Planet.

Last but not least, Erica is currently in charge of organising the next EPEC Annual Week, which was supposed to take place in Padova in June 2020 but, due to the Covid-19, has been postponed to 2021. 

More information about Erica Luzzi:

Social Media:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Contact: e.luzzi@jacobs-university.de

If you are an Early Career member of the Europlanet Society and would like to be featured in an EPEC Profile, find out more about how to submit your profile.

See all the EPEC Profiles.

EPEC Profiles – Joana Marques Oliveira

In this series from the EPEC Communication Working Group, we meet members of the Europlanet Early Career (EPEC) community and find out more about their experiences and aspirations.

Joana Marques Oliveira is currently studying for a PhD at the Paris Observatory, section of Meudon. She is using occultations to study the atmosphere of Triton, focusing on an event that took place on the 5th October 2017, involving over 100 observers with both small and large telescopes, spread throughout Europe, Eastern America, and Northern Africa. Her goal is to find if the atmosphere changed in any way from Voyager 2’s fly-by in 1989 until the 2017 occultation event. This work is supported by the Lucky Star project, an ERC grant, led by her supervisor.

Joana knew that she wanted to go into astrophysics from a young age, when she watched a movie about a female astrophysicist working in NASA. At that moment she realised that, not only astronomy was a career, but she could pursue it. She had a teacher in elementary school that helped her find how to start her career in this field, and she completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in physics specialising in astronomy and astrophysics at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, where her focus was on extragalactic astrophysics.

During those years, she was doing outreach at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, in Lisbon. Being involved with the outreach program helped open doors for her, as well as teach her a lot about outreach and assembling small telescopes, a key skill for occultations. She has done quite a large number of outreach astronomical observing events, including one at a correction centre for minors, an incredibly eye-opening experience. She has even helped organise four conferences thanks to this, and in two of which she was part of the Local Organising Committee (LOC).

She got involved with the Occultations group, through her outreach work. She was interested in the topic, and she decided to work with the scientist in charge of the group on the last year of her Master’s, on a project to study Venus’s atmosphere, where she got to go to Hawai’i to help in an observation mission. They were accepted for a bilateral project between Portugal and France, the Program Pessoa, for the years 2017 and 2018, called OccultGaia.

After her Master’s, she applied for several PhD programs, and she was accepted by the Portuguese Science and Technology foundation to work on the occultation topic here in Paris. She is supporting EPEC as Chair of the Finances Group, and as a member of the Diversity Working Group.

If you are an Early Career member of the Europlanet Society and would like to be featured in an EPEC Profile, find out more about how to submit your profile.

See all the EPEC Profiles.