User:MarsNinja

Biography
I was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts but don't seem to have the Boston accent. After seeing Halley's Comet through a telescope in 1986, I became enamored with all things related to space. In 2001, I received a Bachelor of Arts in Astronomy from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. After working as a post-baccalaureate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I entered the Earth and Environmental Science department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 2004 where I began work on a Master of Arts. While there, I studied the relationship between the geometries of martian gullies and regional insolation to better constrain the formation mechanism of gully features on Mars. After graduating from Wesleyan in 2006, I began work on my Ph.D at the University of New Mexico in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department and the Institute of Meteoritics, where I remain today.

Current Research
My research interests include fluvial and mass movement geomorphology and the formation of chemical weathering products and evaporite minerals in these environments. Most recently, I have been examining martian gullies with erosional and depositional features that are similar to features formed by debris flow on Earth. I am also a collaborator on the ChemCam instrument that will be sent to Mars as part of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled for launch in 2011. ChemCam provides information about the chemical composition of a target material. Currently, I am working on calibrating the ChemCam LIBS instrument for carbonate and sulfate minerals.