Daniella DellaGiustina

Daniella DellaGiustina is a Mexican-American researcher at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, where she holds the position of Senior Staff Scientist. Daniella is the Image Processing Lead Scientist for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return mission, and her research focuses on the remote sensing of asteroid surfaces and planetary seismology. 

She holds a B.S. in Physics from the University of Arizona, and an M.S. in Computational Physics from the University of Alaska. She got her start at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) as an undergraduate in the Arizona Space Grant programme working with Professor Dante Lauretta to characterize mineral phases in meteorites. 

Daniella continued to work at LPL with Dante and Michael Drake, leading a student experiment on the Phase A Discovery OSIRIS Mission study until the end of her undergraduate career. In graduate school, she fused remotely-sensed observations of Earth’s cryosphere with numerical modeling techniques to understand the dynamics of the Greenland ice sheet.

Daniella then returned to the University of Arizona in 2012 as a Research Scientist in the Department of Physics, and transitioned back to LPL in early 2014. Her research involves investigating data sets collected by robotic spacecraft, and comparing these to datasets collected through fieldwork in terrestrial “analog” settings. Analogs are sites on Earth that have similarities to other places in the solar system. 

In her spare time she is an avid rock-climber and outdoor enthusiast, and serves as a Director for the Climbing Association of Southern Arizona (CASA).

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Watch DellaGiustina on Asteroid Day LIVE:
2020 Asteroid Day LIVE digital in Luxembourg