Christopher Russell

Christopher Russell is a member of the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. He was the last acting system-wide Director of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP), and is Director of the UCLA Branch of the California Space Grant Consortium. He is the UCLA principal investigator on the NASA STEREO mission, on the magnetometer instrument for the InSight lander on Mars and the four-spacecraft MMS mission in Earth orbit; he also is a co-investigator on the THEMIS mission to study substorms. He was the principal investigator of the Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and in 2017 he received NASA’s highest honor, the distinguished public service medal to NASA.