Sean C. SolomonSean C. Solomon is Director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and William B. Ransford Professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Columbia University. He earlier served as Director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the Principal Investigator for NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury from the initial mission concept in 1986 to the end of the project in 2017. He also served on the science teams for the Magellan mission to Venus, the Mars Global Surveyor mission, and the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission to the Moon. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former President of the American Geophysical Union, Solomon in 2014 was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama. Read More Read Less