Greetings

I am a research scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

The majority of my past research has been on Martian impact craters, including my doctoral thesis work, though I have expanded into lunar and mercurian craters as well as impact craters strewn across Saturn's moons. Part of my research is as Science Lead on the citizen science project "Moon Mappers" and its sister project, "Mercury Mappers." This is a web portal that shows volunteers from around the world high-resolution imagery of the Moon and asks them identify features such as craters.

One of my research philosophies is that if you're going to study something, do it all. To that end, my doctoral dissertation research was based around creating a vast, global database of craters on the planet Mars from which to extract various nuggets of information (more about that on my Mars crater research page).

I am also interested and active in the education and public outreach (EPO) part of astronomy and consider it a fundamental part of what a research scientist should do. My focus in this area is more of a sub-class of normal EPO as I am most interested in combating the bad science that is out there as it relates to astronomy, geology, and/or physics. I have given many interviews, public lectures, and planetarium shows on these kinds of topics, and I also write a blog entitled, "Exposing PseudoAstronomy," and I run the eponymous podcast. All EPO work is done independent of my SwRI employment.

Please use the navigation on the left to find out more about what I do. Note that the Research has several sub-pages to it (and may not work quite right on a smrt phone).