Adriana Ocampo

Born on 5 January 1955 in Barranquilla, Colombia, Adriana Ocampo is a planetary geologist and NASA science program manager. Raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ocampo became interested in science at a young age. Her family emigrated to the US when she was 14. In 1973, after her junior year in high school, Ocampo got a summer job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where she continued to work as she earned her BS in geology from California State University (CSU), Los Angeles, and MS in planetary geology from CSU, Northridge. She went on to earn a PhD in planetary science from the University of Amsterdam. In 1991 Ocampo coauthored a paper in Nature that suggested that an area around Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula could be the site of a giant crater that formed some 66 million years ago. Her research led to the discovery of the Chicxulub impact crater , the signature of a catastrophic meteor strike that likely wiped out the dinosaurs and many other species on Earth. Ocampo has led six research expeditions to that region. At NASA she serves as the lead program executive for New Frontiers, which includes the Juno mission to Jupiter, the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the asteroid sample return mission OSIRIS-REx. She was named National Hispanic Scientist of the Year in 2016.

Date in History: 5 January 1955