Veronica Hegelein

Geological Sciences

Overview

I joined the Planetary Habitability and Technology Lab in Fall 2022 pursuing a Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. Britney Schmidt. My research interests combine oceanography, planetary science, and astrobiology through terrestrial analogs to increase our understanding of the cryosphere on Earth and other planetary bodies. My main focus in this work is using oceanographic data collected by the remotely operated vehicle Icefin from beneath ice shelves in Antarctica and Greenland to investigate small-scale ice-ocean interactions and boundary layer processes. This enables direct calculations of melt rates and thus more accurate estimates for timescales associated with future sea level rise, and can also be used to improve modeling of ocean circulation and ice processes on ocean moons such as Europa and Enceladus. Additionally, I am a member of the Oceans Across Space and Time project where I use oceanographic data from extreme environments on Earth to characterize habitability from an astrobiological perspective.

I graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in astrophysics and a minor in atmospheric and oceanic sciences in June 2022, during which I did ocean biogeochemistry research on the biological and biogeochemical impacts of submesoscale coherent vortices within the North Pacific. 

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