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, her research focuses on deriving optical constants for Europa-relevant materials under accurate environmental conditions. She is the Consortium Lead for the In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) focus group in the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC), dedicated to building collaborations in academia and industry to achieve sustained human presence on the Moon. Dr. Berdis is also the organizer for the Ice Giant Systems Seminar Series (https://icegiantsseminar.jhuapl.edu/), a monthly meetup that covers developments in the study of any and all parts of ice giant systems. 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).