Tag: epec_profiles

EPEC Profiles – Indhu Varatharajan

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.

Indhu Varatharajan is a final-year PhD student at Planetary Spectroscopy Laboratory (PSL) group at Department of Planetary Laboratories, Institute of Planetary Research, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Berlin.

Being a girl child from a village in southern India with a dream to pursue planetary career since 13 year old and with no adequate financial background, its been one hell of a ride until here. I did not do it alone and I had help throughout my journey — and everyday I try my best to be someone’s help in their journey of a planetary career.

I strongly believe that international collaboration in very important when it comes to planetary science. This is my motivation to become the council member and Chair of Europlanet Early Career (EPEC) Network. I am passionate about volunteering for leader/professional posts as its my best chance to promote planetary and astronomy science to a wider community and see the community I envision it to be.

I am currently a final-year PhD student at the Planetary Spectroscopy Laboratory (PSL) group at the Department of Planetary Laboratories, Institute of Planetary Research, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Berlin and will be graduating by end of 2020. My PhD is focused on ‘Evaluating new spectral analysis techniques to study the hot surface of Mercury with MERTIS on ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission’ and my advisor is Dr Jörn Helbert, Co-PI of MERTIS. I am officially Co-Investigator of MERTIS since 2018.

In the last 8 years, I am have been working in the field of planetary science investigating various planetary exploration methods such as laboratory spectroscopy from ultraviolet to far-infrared spectroscopy of planetary analogues, laboratory emissivity studies of hot planetary analogues under simulated planetary surface conditions, nanoscale spectroscopy of synthetic planetary analogue materials with synchrotron facilities, telescope observations, machine learning approaches to data analysis of orbital hyperspectral datasets, and planetary field analogue studies targeting in-situ planetary exploration. Over these years, I have had the opportunities to study and explore various aspects of planetary targets include the Moon, Mars, Mercury, near earth asteroids, main belt asteroids, Earth and meteorites.

I am personally motivated towards developing cross disciplinary AI-ML techniques for planetary surface exploration through an integrated spectroscopy approach. I am passionate about designing and building planetary science solutions that transform hierarchical datasets at scale and generate valuable insights to planetary surface resources and drive crucial exploration decisions.

More information about Indhu Varatharajan:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Instagram

Contact: indhu.varatharajan@dlr.de

The compilation of all publications and abstracts are linked at this NASA ADS link: http://tiny.cc/indhu_varatharajan

Academics and others: BE in Geoinformatics (Chennai, India), MSc in Planetary Science (London, UK), (ongoing) PhD in Planetary Spectroscopy and MERTIS/BEPICOLOMBO Data Science (Berlin, Germany), Co-Investigator of MERTIS payload onboard ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission (2018-present), Chair of Europlanet Early Career (EPEC) Committee (2017-present), RAS Councillor (2019-2020), Founder and President of Astronomy and Planetary Science Club of CEG (2009-2012).

Indhu Varatharajan’s special interests: AI-driven integrated planetary spectroscopy and planetary surface science and exploration, Moon-Mercury science, space weathering, volatiles, volcanism, impact cratering, STEM outreach.

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 – Solmaz Adeli

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.

Solmaz Adeli is a planetary geologist, working as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Planetary Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Studying the planets has always been a dream to me, since I was little, and I couldn’t be happier for being in this research topic in this particular period of time, where there are missions to various planets, asteroids, icy moons, even far Kuiper belt objects!

Researching the past climate and surface conditions of the Red Planet is my expertise. I am actively involved in the HRSC camera science team on board ESA’s Mars Express mission, and the PanCam camera on board the future ESA and Roscosmos rover, Rosalind Franklin, which is a part of the ExoMars mission.

I obtained my doctoral degree in 2016 from the Freie Universität Berlin and German Space Center (DLR) on the topic of ‘History of liquid water on Mars’. My thesis was about reconstructing the geological history of a region on the southern hemisphere of Mars, where the presence of one of the largest paleolakes on Mars has been hypothesized (Eridania lake). During my first postdoc, I studied the recent glaciation phases in the midlatitude regions of Mars.

Currently I am supporting the Rosalind Franklin rover science team in their landing site high resolution mapping effort, by leading a part of the mapping exercise. In addition, I am also involved in preparing samples to be analyzed by the rover’s scientific payload. This allowed me to visit the exobiology research team at CBM/CNRS laboratories in Orleans, France last year, for a couple of months. For this visit, I won a travel grant from the Geo.X network in Berlin and Brandenburg.

In addition to the research activities, I also teach planetary science-related topics at the Freie Universität Berlin and Universität Potsdam, and occasionally supervise bachelor and master thesis, as well as co-supervising doctoral studies. Interacting with interested and motivated students is one of the most rewarding parts of my job.

More information about Solmaz Adeli:

• Twitter
• Researchgate

Contact: Solmaz.Adeli@dlr.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 – Gene Schmidt

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.

Gene Schmidt has been fortunate to travel throughout the world due to geology.

My parents were both geologists and because of their various research projects I grew up living in Nevada, Montana, Argentina, and Michigan. Due to this type of upbringing I have had a strong interest in both geology and outer space since I was a child.

I received a bachelor’s degree in Geology from Western Michigan University and entered North Dakota’s 2008 oil boom as a well-site geologist aiding various oil companies in horizontal drilling. I later received a master’s degree in Earth Sciences at Brock University in Ontario, Canada where I began my research on the interior layered deposits of Mars.

I moved to Italy in 2017 to obtain a PhD in planetary geology from the International Research School of Planetary Science and obtained many opportunities to present my research across Europe. I am now a researcher at the University Roma Tre where I am continuing geologic research on Mars and expanding my research to Martian analogs, spectroscopy, and the Precambrian geology of Earth.

More information about Gene Schmidt:

• ResearchGate

Contact: gene.w.schmidt@gmail.com

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 – 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.