Celebrating our new Professor of Planetary Mineralogy, Susanne Schwenzer

We are celebrating a new Professor in EEES. Dr Susanne Schwenzer has recently been promoted to Professor of Planetary Mineralogy.

Susanne has made contributions in research, teaching and public engagement over her impressive career. Here we offer a brief overview of Susanne's contributions.

Exploring planet Mars is an exciting international effort driven by one of the biggest questions of all time: ‘Are we alone in the Universe?’ Susanne is proud to be part of this effort, and to bring it to OU students through teaching on undergraduate and Masters level.

Susanne has been working on the NASA Mars Curiosity Rover Team since the rover landed in Gale Crater on Mars on 6th August of 2012. She is part of the operations team that decides what measurements and images the rover takes, and where it will drive next. 

Susanne specializes into thermochemical modeling, a method that allows to decipher element mobility and the composition of fluids even many millions of years in the past, from just the rocks the rover observes. Working with her colleagues at AstrobiologyOU, she figures out not only if microbes could have lived in those environments, but also which ones would fair best. This helps to develop the 'best search strategies' for future space missions.

Susanne is also an Interdisciplinary Scientist on the future ESA ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover mission, due to launch in 2028. She serves on the NASA/ESA “Mars Sample Return Science Campaign Group” and “Mars Sample Return Measurement definition Team”, both of which are international expert panels looking into the science priorities for the first returned samples from the red planet due to arrive on Earth in the early 2030ies.

Susanne has brough this expertise to OU students through her teaching. At the undergraduate level, she is part of S283 Planetary Science and Astrobiology, and SXPS288 Experiments in Physics and Space. Her teaching includes a variety of materials, of course there are the written materials, the video content and interactives OU students know to expect.

Susanne has also led teaching innovation. For S818 Masters in Space Science she has worked with the OU’s OpenSTEM Labs to create the Guardian Award winning Mars mission simulation bringing a realistic and exciting activity for students to explore what it really is like to drive a rover on Mars.

There is one aspect that motivates Susanne even more than Mars: “What really gets me out of bed in the morning, and what is really similar between the OU and the NASA Curiosity rover team is the people I work with, their dedication and passion, and their respect and support for each other.”  

Many congratulations on achieving this signifcant academic career milestone Susanne, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy.