Sarah Braden, ASU, Arizona

Sarah is a first year graduate student at Arizona State University, pursuing a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2008 with her B.S. in Physics and minor in Business German. For two years she studied lunar mare basalts, lunar petrology and mineralogy, regolith grain size, and ilmenite abundance. Sarah presented her work on lunar thin sections at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in 2006. Through the Northwestern Society of Physics Students, Sarah organized educational workshops on applied physics for middle school students, including topics like fiber optics, hard disk drives, and robotics. Currently she is working on images of the Moon taken by the Cassini spacecraft, and looks forward to working on the Apollo Flight Film Scanning Project and LROC.
Sarah spent two summers working as an intern at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, rollerblading, swimming and sushi. Other interests include studying solar energy, photovoltaics, lunar in situ resource utilization, and the mineralogy of Europa.