Marc Fries is a planetary scientist within the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at the Johnson Space Center. He also serves as the Cosmic Dust Curator, entrusted with the care of NASA’s collection of astromaterials collected by high-altitude aircraft. Fries is a Raman spectroscopist and an expert on carbonaceous materials in natural systems that range from organic compounds to macromolecular solids. He currently performs Advanced Curation research to improve the care of current and future NASA collections. This work includes a consortium study of a meteorite from the Hamburg, MI meteorite fall that has been kept cold since it fell, the CARDINAL prototype for high-altitude balloon-borne cosmic dust collection, as well as the Opera hand-held instrument for ambient contamination monitoring. He also studies methane plumes on Mars, is a member of the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument team for Mars 2020, and has served as the Principal Investigator of the Strata-1 experiment on the International Space Station. His research includes using open-source data such as weather radar imagery and seismometry to locate meteorite falls, and has located over three dozen meteorite falls to date. Dr. Fries earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2002, following on a Masters’ in Materials Engineering at UAB and a BS in Chemistry from Troy State University. His hobbies include restoring a 1980 International Scout II diesel truck (it is finally almost finished!), as well as some rather involved experimentation in zymurgy
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