Faculty/Staff Detail

Melissa Morris, Physics Department, was invited by NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. to act as a contracted program officer to assist in the administration of several programs under the Planetary Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate. She has taken a leave of absence from teaching at SUNY Cortland for the fall semester to perform this important service to our country and the scientific community. She will continue to advise her SUNY Cortland undergraduate research assistants and postdoctoral researchers while she is on leave.

Morris was a coauthor on a presentation titled “Thermal History Match Between CBb Chondrules and Impact Plume Models” at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society, held July 23-28 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Morris’ undergraduate research assistant and current SUNY Cortland senior Andrew Duval spent six weeks at Arizona State University (ASU) over the summer collecting data on meteorites using the state-of-the-art facilities at ASU’s Center for Meteorite Studies. The results of his research will be the subject of his honors thesis, and will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Also, Morris had a Career Profile posted on the blog of The American Astronomical Society Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy on August 8.