Facilitator & Presenters

• Dr. Marc Kuchner (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

  Dr. Marc Kuchner is NASA Citizen Science Officer. Marc oversees a portfolio of 36 citizen science projects. These projects involve more than 2 million members of the public in real NASA science, as rigorous as any other NASA science project. Trained as an astrophysicist, Marc founded the citizen science projects Disk Detective and Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, which search for new planet-forming disks, brown dwarfs and planets using data from NASA's WISE mission. Marc is also known for inventing the band-limited coronagraph, used on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). He earned an A.B. from Harvard in 1994 and a Ph.D. in astronomy with a minor in physics from Caltech in 2001. He received an early career achievement award from SPIE in 2009, and Robert H. Goddard awards in 2018 and 2021 for his work on citizen science. Marc also writes books for children and the occasional country song.

• Dr. Laura Trouille (The Adler Planetarium / Zooniverse)

  Dr. Laura Trouille is Vice President of Science Engagement at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, co-Principal Investigator for the Zooniverse, and a Research Associate at Northwestern University. While earning her Ph.D. in astrophysics and pursuing postdoctoral research on supermassive black holes and galaxy evolution, she fell in love with engaging the public in science. She has been leading the Adler’s science engagement efforts, including public participation in scientific research, since 2015.

• Dr. Rob Zellem (Jet Propulsion Laboratory / California Institute of Technology)

  Dr. Rob Zellem is an exoplanet astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on ground—and space-based observations—of the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets outside of our Solar System. Rob is a member of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Coronograph Instrument (CGI; an instrument that will directly-image exoplanets) Project Science Team and is the lead of developing its Science Calibration Plan. He is the JPL Commissioning Lead of NESSI, a new multi-object spectrograph at Palomar Observatory that will study tens of these alien worlds. He has been involved in benchmarking the performance through simulations of NASA and ESA exoplanet-dedicated missions such as CASE, the NASA contribution to ESA's ARIEL mission, and the Astro2020 missions Origins Space Telescope and HabEx. He is also the Project Lead of Exoplanet Watch, a citizen science project that will aid in the characterization of exoplanets.

  Rob was born just outside the Philadelphia city limits but grew up in Hendersonville, TN. He went to Villanova University where he graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Astronomy and Astrophysics, minoring in Physics, Mathematics, and Classics, and getting an Honors Concentration. His love of travel and learning about other cultures brought him to University College London in England where he got his MSc in Space Science. He then moved out west to Tucson, AZ, where he received his Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. He is currently staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When he's not observing exoplanets, he enjoys jazz piano, cooking, trying not to kill all his plants, brewing beer, playing ice hockey, and fantasizing about retiring to work at Disney.
   

• Dr. Martha Irene Saladino (Facilitator - Space Telescope Science Institute)

  Dr. Martha Irene Saladino is an Education & Outreach Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where she supports the outreach efforts of different NASA missions and projects, including the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and NASA’s Universe of Learning. Martha Irene obtained her Ph.D. in Astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where she developed numerical simulations of evolved Sun-like double stars. Outside of work, Martha Irene enjoys running, reading, and digital illustration.