Jodi Berdis

Dr. Jodi Berdis defended her PhD in Astronomy from New Mexico State University in March 2021. During her PhD at NMSU, she was a NASA Jenkins Graduate Fellow and conducted part of her research at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her dissertation was focused on the composition of Europa’s surface, and consisted of laboratory-, ground-, and space-based spectroscopic observations, including remote sensing, as well as modeling efforts to constrain the water ice crystallinity of Europa’s surface.

At APL, she is a facilitator for the Surface Power and In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) focus groups in the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC), dedicated to building collaborations in academia and industry to achieve sustained human presence on the Moon. She is the organizer for the Neptune/Triton System Seminar Series (http://neptuneodyssey.jhuapl.edu/Events/), and leads a project dedicated to identifying whether a flyby spacecraft to a potentially hazardous asteriod (PHA) could acquire sufficient imagery for planetary defense characterization. She is especially interested in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives, and serves on the Professional Culture & Climate Subcommittee (PCCS) of the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS).