Researchers and Associates

Daniel Green

Associate
Jacobsen Group
Daniel Green is Director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams and he is involved in research of small bodies of the solar system — particularly comets and meteors, but also minor planets.  He collects and archives/publishes data on comets from observers around the world, and these data are published in the International Comet Quarterly (the world’s largest journal devoted solely to comets, which he edits) and posted at the Cometary Science Archive on its computers at EPS.  He also directs the acquisition of CCD images of comets on a nightly basis using telescopes in Tibet, and those images are analyzed, measured, and archived; searching for new comets and near-earth asteroids.  He is a member of the International Astronomical Union’s 13-member Committee on Small Body Nomenclature, which approves names for comets and minor planets (including trans-Neptunian objects) and their satellites.  He is a member of Harvard’s Origins program, with an interest in how observational data of comets can help in the study of their origins and in the origins of the solar system.  Green obtained his Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from the University of Durham (U.K.), his thesis focusing on analysis of old astronomical data in the historical literature using modern techniques, to extend our archive of useful data by centuries.

Lucy Hutyra

Associate

Lucy R. Hutyra is an Associate Professor of Earth & Environment at Boston University. Her research focuses on the atmosphere-biosphere exchange of CO2, with a particularly focus on urban systems.

Her recent work has focused on improving ecosystem models for carbon exchange within cities, emissions inventories, and the development urban carbon monitoring systems. Hutyra is the Director of the Urban Climate Research Initiative and the Associate Director for the NRT PhD training program on biogeosciences & environmental health at Boston University. She holds a Ph.D. in Earth & Planetary Sciences from Harvard University and a B.S. in Forestry from University of Washington.

Sai Krishna Katla

Associate
Perez-Mercader Lab, Rowland Institute
Sai Krishna Katla earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science from Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), India in 2011. After graduating, he pursued postdoctoral research in Nanofabrication and Nanomaterials group at the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD), a Synchrotron Light Source at the Louisiana State University (LSU). His research at LSU was part of the Center for Atomic-Level Catalyst Design, a DOE sponsored Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC). During this period, his research focused on (i) Application of atomically precise gold nanoclusters in catalysis and magnetism, (ii) Application of millifluidics-based lab-on-a-chip devices for synthesis and in situ time-resolved characterization of nanomaterials. Later, he worked on electrocatalytic applications of nanomaterials as a Research Scientist from 2014 to 2015 in the 3D-Nanostructuring group at Institute of Physics & Institute of Micro- and Nanotechnologies (IMN), Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. Further, he worked on photothermal application of atomically precise gold nanoclusters as a Research Scientist - Associate and later as a Lecturer at The University of Texas at El Paso from 2015 to 2018. He is currently working on chemical computing and other problems associated with the creation of chemical artificial life as a Research Associate in Pérez-Mercader group.

Jenan Kharbush

Associate
Pearson Group

Jenan is a microbial biogeochemist and oceanographer interested in the important connections between microbial ecology and marine biogeochemical cycling.

Originally from Wisconsin, Jenan obtained a B.A. in biology and chemistry from Ripon College in Ripon, WI. Subsequently she earned her PhD from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, studying chemical oceanography in the lab of Dr. Lihini Aluwihare. Her thesis research focused on the use of molecular signatures to investigate microbial metabolic diversity and function in marine environments, and specifically targeted two important classes of microbial lipid biomarkers: bacterial hopanoids and intact polar diacylglycerols.

Ding Ma

Associate
Kuang Group

Ding Ma received his Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University. Advised by Prof.ZhimingKuang, his dissertation research investigated three dominant patterns of large-scale atmospheric variability, namely the South Asian monsoon, Madden-Julian Oscillation and the annular mode.Beforemoving back to Harvard, he was an Earth Institute Fellow at Columbia University, where he was working with Prof. Adam Sobel to explore extreme weather associated with large-scale variability. His work emphasizes a combination of observational analysis andnumerical modeling. Guided by observations, numerical experiments are designed and conducted to pursue a better theoretical understanding of the large-scale atmospheric variability in the past, present and future. The main goal of his work is to identify essentialphysical mechanisms governing the large-scale circulation variability.

Juan Perez-Mercader

Senior Research Fellow and Principal Investigator
Perez-Mercader Group, Rowland Institute

Juan Pérez-Mercader earned his Ph.D. from the City College of New York. He is an Elected Member of the International Academy of Astronautics and of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1998 in Association with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, he founded Spain's Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) of which he was its first Director. He is the architect of Spain's current participation with infrastructure and instrumentation on board Mars Science Laboratory that arrived on Mars in August 2012. He is Profesor de Investigación in Spain's National Research Council (CSIC) and an External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. In 2010, he joined Harvard as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the university's Origins of Life Initiative, where he leads a project on the "Top-down Synthesis of an Ex-novo Chemical Artificial Living System".