Thanh Tran, ASU, Arizona

Thanh-or Tawny as she is known is currently a junior majoring in Mechanical Engineering at Arizona State University. She was born in Vietnam and came to the United States when she was eight years old, and since then she has excelled in areas relating to math and science. Before she came to work at LROC, she did not have much interest in geology or planetary science. She was naive enough to think that space is a fascinating world far away enough that she would probably never get a chance to dirty my hands with it. But the longer she works on awesome projects at LROC, the more fascinated she becomes with space, quickly realizing that space is not just a theory anymore, but a new experimental field that is growing rapidly. Tawny thinks that perhaps one day, she may decide to change her direction in her studies.
As a student worker, she works on projects and do a lot of miscellaneous tasks in all kinds of research areas, from LROC to Apollo to MESSENGER missions. She has also learned lots of new skills and used new programs such as ISIS and IDL programming. Currently she is working on writing a program in IDL that will help scientists plan out and understand what is possible in terms of targeting and getting a 25x25km mosaic of a certain site of interest using the spacecraft's ephemeris.