Dr. Ted A. Maxwell Associate Director, Collections and Research Department Adjunct Staff, Center for Earth and Planetary Studies National Air and Space Museum maxwellt@si.edu

Dr. Ted A. Maxwell is Associate Director for the Department of Collections and Research at the National Air and Space Museum, which entails the curatorial and scientific research departments, the Museum's Archives, and the Collections Division. From 1992 until 1996, he served as the Senior Advisor for Science at the Museum, providing review of the Museum's efforts in space science and representing the Smithsonian Institution on scientific research in the U.S. Global Change Research Program. From 1989 until 1992, he was Discipline Scientist for NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program, and from 1982 through 1989, was Chairman of the Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies.

He joined the staff of the National Air and Space Museum in 1976 after serving as a Visiting Graduate Fellow at the Lunar Science Institute in Houston. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 1971, received his M.S. degree in geology from the University of Utah in 1973, and his Ph.D. also from the University of Utah in 1977. His early graduate work was concentrated on fluvial systems, including analogs of channels discovered on Mars by Mariner 9. For his Ph.D. studies, he worked on the Apollo Lunar Sounder Experiment, a radar device flown on Apollo 17 to probe the lunar subsurface.

Maxwell has continued his planetary research with more than fifty publications in the professional literature and numerous lectures to both professional and public audiences. He is a Principal Investigator in NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program, was Director (1982-1989) of the Regional Planetary Image Facility located at NASM, and is a past Chairman of the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America. He is also Series Editor for the Smithsonian Library of the Solar System.

His terrestrial research concentrates on the use of remote sensing data to study environmental change in desert regions, particularly Egypt and Sudan, where he has been conducting field studies since 1978. He is co-editor of "Desert Landforms of Southwest Egypt: A Basis for Comparison with Mars", and has recently been using a variety of remote sensing data and field information to determine sand transport volumes and human-induced changes in the desert. Maxwell was a Principal Investigator in NASA's Solid Earth Science Program, and was a Co-Investigator on the SIR-C mission, a Space Shuttle radar experiment flown in 1994.

Dr. Maxwell's CV (PDF)

Some of Dr. Maxwell's research projects:
Identification of Former Lakes on Mars