I came to JPL to look for life beyond Earth. I'm a Project Staff Scientist on NASA's Europa Clipper and a research scientist in planetary interiors. These days most of my technical work runs through coding agents that I direct.
Europa hides a salty ocean under an ice shell, and Europa Clipper launched in October 2024 to find out whether it could support life. I help the project scientist steer the mission's science, and I study how ice shells move heat and material between the surface and the ocean below.
Howell & Pappalardo (2020). NASA's Europa Clipper: a mission to a potentially habitable ocean world. Nature Communications 11.
Independent work, built outside my JPL and NASA roles from publicly available information. Most of it is written by coding agents working under my direction.
A flight-planning workspace for mission design. It puts trajectories, observations, and tradeoffs in one place so science and engineering teams can plan against the same picture.
Developed with coding agents as an independent project.
Notes on generative AI for science: what changes when research runs through agents, and what scientists need to learn to work that way.
Talks and workshops helping planetary scientists and engineers work with coding agents, so they can see where research is heading.
Before JPL, the work took me to some extreme places on Earth. Toggle the scale to see how they compare with the world I study now.
To scale. Europa figures are NASA estimates: ice shell 15 to 25 km thick over an ocean 60 to 150 km deep.
Remotely piloted deep-sea submersibles in the deepest ocean on Earth. The depth shown is Challenger Deep, the trench's lowest point.
Summited Africa's highest peak.
Led month-long deployments on glaciers to test technology built for icy worlds.
Earth's full range of relief, from Kilimanjaro's summit to Challenger Deep, is about 17 km.
Podcasts, radio, and public talks about Europa, ocean worlds, and the search for life.
For collaborations on AI for science, mission concepts, or talks, LinkedIn is the best way to reach me.