James William Head

James W. Head III is the Louis and Elizabeth Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University. He earned an undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee University (BS, 1964) and received his Ph.D from Brown University in 1969. From 1968 to 1972, while serving at NASA Headquarters (Bellcomm, Inc.), he participated in the selection of landing sites for the Apollo program, in training Astronaut crews in geology and surface exploration, in planning and evaluating the package of experiments to be deployed on the Moon, in mission operations in Houston during lunar surface exploration, and in preliminary analysis of the lunar samples returned by the Astronauts. For these activities, he received the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the Geological Society of America Special Commendation. He continues to be involved in training of the NASA Astronauts. In 1973-1974 he served as Interim Director of the Lunar Science Institute in Houston, Texas. He has been the Director of the NASA Northeast Regional Data Center and has served on the editorial board of several journals. He has been elected to Fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, and the Meteoritical Society, and President of the Planetary Geology Division of the GSA and Planetology Section of the AGU.
Dr. Head's research centers on the study of geological processes that form and modify the surfaces, crusts, and lithospheres of planets, how these processes vary with time, and how such processes interact to produce the historical geological record preserved on the planets. He has followed up his research on volcanism, tectonism and glaciation with field studies on active volcanoes in Hawaii and at Mt. St. Helens, on volcanic deposits on the seafloor with three deep-sea submersible dives, and during five field seasons in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, and one in the Arctic (Svalbard). He is an investigator on NASA and Russian Space Missions, including Soviet Venera 15/16, Phobos, Phobos Sample Return, Luna, and the US Magellan (Venus), Galileo (Jupiter), Mars Global Surveyor, Russian Mars 1996, and Space Shuttle missions.  He is presently participating in the US MESSENGER mission to Mercury, analysis of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper experiment on the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the lunar laser altimeter (LOLA) on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, the GRAIL mission to the Moon, and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission. He has published over 350 papers in professional journals. He has received several NASA Public Service Medals, as well as the Geological Society of America’s G. K. Gilbert award presented annually for outstanding contributions to the solution of fundamental problems in planetary geology. In 2010, he received the European Geosciences Union’s Runkorn-Florensky Medal for exceptional contributions to planetology, and he will be awarded the Geological Society of America’s Penrose Medal in November 2015.
He has a keen interest in international scientific activities, having chaired the International Union of Geological Sciences Commission on Comparative Planetology and served as a delegate on the US/USSR Joint Working Group on Solar System Exploration, the NASA delegation to the Interagency Consultative Group, and on the NASA Advisory Council Task Force on International Relations.  He was a founding member of the International Space University, and in 1989 was inducted into the International Academy of Astronautics.  He has worked closely with Soviet and Russian space scientists and is the Co-convener of the Brown University/Vernadsky Institute (Moscow) Symposia, now in its 30th year.  Dr. Head’s teaching ranges from an introductory-level course in planetology (enrollment from 75-150 yearly) through graduate education (having been the principal advisor to over 50 Master’s Degree recipients and over 30 Ph.D recipients) and he involves his students in all international projects and meetings.