Graeme Poole is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol working on early solar system cosmochemistry and the formation of planetary bodies. Via the dark art of mass spectrometry, he is measuring isotopes in meteorites to gauge the origin of volatiles delivered to Earth. Meteorites from primitive bodies are the equivalent of a time machine; they hold a record of the conditions during solar system formation over 4.5 billion years ago and have remained (mostly) unchanged since.
Prior to this, Graeme studied for a PhD at Imperial College London, researching nucleosynthetic isotope anomalies and the conditions in the solar nebula at the time of terrestrial planet formation. During his undergraduate degree in Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, Graeme also had the privilege to work on lunar samples brought back by the Apollo missions. So if it’s a rock and it’s from space, Graeme is all over it!
Graeme is currently co-chair of the United Kingdom Planetary Forum (@UKPlanetary), a body that promotes planetary research within the UK, and is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (@RoyalAstroSoc). Outside of the lab, Graeme can be found almost exclusively on the cricket pitch.
Larry Nittler is a staff scientist in the Dept. of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. He is a cosmochemist and planetary scientist whose research interests span stellar evolution, nucleosynthesis, interstellar and interplanetary dust, meteorites, and the formation and evolution of planets. He earned a BA in Physics from Cornell University in 1991 and a PhD in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1996. He has been on the Carnegie staff since 2001, following a postdoc at the Carnegie and two years as a staff scientist at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center. His laboratory research focuses on isotopic and mineralogical properties of microscopic extraterrestrial materials including presolar grains in meteorites, interplanetary dust particles and spacecraft-returned samples, including solar wind and comet Wild 2 samples returned by the Genesis and Stardust missions, respectively. He also performs spacecraft-based remote-sensing geochemical research on planetary bodies. He led the analysis of X-ray fluorescence data for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, which orbited asteroid Eros in 2000-2001, and for the MESSENGER mission, which orbited Mercury from 2011-2015. He also served as Deputy Principle Investigator for MESSENGER. He is on the Science Team for the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo Mercury mission, to be launched in 2018, and is a Participating Scientist on JAXA’s Hayabusa2 asteroid sample return mission. He received the Nier prize of the Meteoritical Society in 2001 and became a Fellow of the same society in 2010. Asteroid 5992 Nittler is named in his honor. In addition to his scientific research, Larry is a jazz pianist and composer who performs frequently with his soul-jazz group Dr. Nittler’s Elastic Soultastic Planet. He lives in Washington DC with his wife, physicist Rhonda Stroud, and their daughter and two cats.