Tanya Harrison is a Planetary Scientist and Director of Research at Arizona State University‘s Space Technology and Science Initiative. She is on the science team of the Mars Opportunity rover.

Harrison’s research is in martian geomorphology and terrestrial analogues, spectroscopy and glaciology.^[2]

Harrison took a break between her Bachelors and PhD. In 2008, Harrison became Assistant Staff Scientist at Malin Space Science Systems, after receiving a NASA scholarship.^[6] Here she was on the science operation team for NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.^[2] She also worked for the Mars Color Imager, the Mast Cameras and Mars Hand Lens Imager.^[6] During this time, Harrison worked on science track programming for Norwescon.^[7] Between 2010 and 2012 Harrison worked at The Planetary Society as web editor.^[5] In 2011, Harrison was part of the team that won the NASA Group Achievement Award for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.^[8] She won a second in 2013 as part of the Mars Science Laboratory Mast Camera team.^[8]

Harrison won the 2014 Zonta Amelia Earhart Fellowship and Geological Society of America On to the Future Award.^[9] She worked as a Research Assistant in the Centre for Planetary Science & Exploration at the University of Western Ontario.^[10][11]

In 2016 she won the Geological Society of America Paul Pellas-Ryder Award.^[8] That year she became a postdoctoral scholar as part of the NewSpace Initiative at Arizona State University.^[12][5] She works with commercial space companies (including Blue Origin and Bigelow Aerospace).^[1][13] Harrison has cited NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission as one of her biggest inspirations.^[14] She was selected for Planet’s Science Ambassadors program.^[15]

(From Wikipedia, March 2018)