Our Team - L'Group

Dr. Larry Nittler

I am a Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. As a cosmochemist, I study the origin and evolution of stars, the galaxy, and the solar system, both through laboratory analysis of extraterrestrial materials like meteorites and returned comet and asteroid samples and through planetary remote sensing via spacecraft. I have played leading roles in the analysis of comet and solar wind samples returned by NASA’s Stardust and Genesis missions, respectively, and am actively analyzing asteroid samples returned by the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx missions. I served as Deputy Principal Investigator on NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury. I am currently a NASA Participating Scientist on the Japanese asteroid sample-return mission, Hayabusa2 and a member of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo Mercury mission team. I received the Alfred O. Nier prize of the Meteoritical Society in 2001 and was named a fellow of the same society in 2010. Asteroid 5992 Nittler is named in my honor.

Ren Marquez

(He/him)

Buseck Postdoctoral Fellow working on isotopic anomalies in meteorites, using both multi-collector inductively-coupled plasma mass spectroemtry and NanoSIMS..

Katelyn Frizzell

(She/they)

Third-year PhD candidate working on analysis of x-ray fluorescence data from the planet Mercury and modeling of mudflows on Mars (with Prof. J. Adler ).

Hypatia Meraviglia

(They/them/theirs)

Third-year PhD candidate in geosciences at Arizona State University, where they image the carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen isotopes of insoluble organic matter in CI and CI-like material. Previously, they worked on the icy moons of the outer Solar System, in particular how meteoritic material contributes to the atmospheric chemistry of Saturn’s moon Titan. They grew up in Arkansas, where they earned an A.A. at the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana in 2019 and a B.S. in physics and a B.A. in linguistics at the University of Central Arkansas in 2023.

Valentina Forero Fuentes

(She/her)

Ph.D. student in Geological Sciences at Arizona State University, where she focuses on describing and analyzing the macromolecular organic matter of CI/CM extraterrestrial material. She previously studied the relationship between insoluble organic matter and soluble organic molecules through hydrothermal experiments at Hiroshima University, where she earned her M.Sc. She received her B.S. in Geosciences from the Universidad de los Andes, focusing on the geochemistry of late Cretaceous concretions.

Rishant Prakash

(He/him)

Cosmochemist who integrates isotope geochemistry and astrophysical modeling to reveal how stellar processes shaped the Solar System’s earliest materials.

Sarinah Wahl

(She/her)

Second project student working with Dr. Nittler. Sarinah is investigating sulfur isotope anomalies in meteorites to understand mass independent fractionation of sulfur during the early Solar System. She uses NanoSIMS and SEM to detect and measure sulfur and its isotopes for her second project. Her main research area is organic geochemistry and its application for ocean worlds and she works with Everett Shock for her main project.

Cassandra Kraver

(She/her)

Second project student working with Dr. Nittler. Cassandra is developing SEM methods for non-destructively identifying large presolar SiC grains in meteorites in order to perform treace-element isotopic measurements on them and better constrian the stellar origin of heavy elements.