Dr. Andrea Donnellan is head and professor at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Previously she was a Senior Research Scientist at JPL and managed the Instrument Systems Section. Donnellan studies earthquakes and crustal deformation using geodetic imaging and computational modeling. She leads NASA’s Surface Topography and Vegetation Study. Donnellan has degrees in Geology (BS Ohio State University), Geophysics (MS and PhD Caltech), and Computer Science (MS University of Southern California). She held a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Donnellan is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and The Explorers Club. In 1996 she won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and in 2012 NASA’s Software of the Year Award. She has a glacier named after her in Antarctica for her work on that continent.

Andrea Donnellan experimented with pinhole cameras around the age of 10 and has never been far from a camera since. Her father helped her set up a darkroom and she experimented with composition, exposure, and processing. Her work is all digital now, but she still remembers the fundamentals she learned from her father and as a 4-H member where her primary focus was on photography. As a senior in high school Andrea Donnellan was sponsored by Eastman Kodak to attend the National 4-H Congress in Chicago. Andrea finds no end of subjects capturing scenery and the wildlife from her backyard to locations near and far. She has traveled globally to all seven continents, but most enjoys capturing local beauty whether it be in southern California, the Eastern Sierra, or Indiana.