About Me.

Elizabeth Spiers is a Weston Howland Jr. Postdoctoral Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She studies how ocean worlds, including Earth, evolve and how that evolution affects their habitability.

Growing up near NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Elizabeth was inspired by the amazing work of the scientists and engineers who worked there. She joined an amateur astronomy group in middle school and would help with public outreach astronomy events around the LA area.

Elizabeth attended Purdue University where she graduated with a double major in Applied Physics and Planetary Science. While there, she was the women’s captain for the triathlon team and an active member of the Women in Physics group. Her work as an undergraduate researcher in a biophysics lab led her toward the field of astrobiology and interest in the bio-potential of planetary environments.

After completing her undergraduate degrees, Elizabeth began her PhD at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Planetary Habitability & Technology Lab led by Prof. Britney Schmidt. Her dissertation focused on understanding how the dynamic thermal-orbital evolution of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, may have affected rates of material transfer and thus the ocean’s composition through time. She was also active in the astrobiology community at Georgia Tech, receiving a graduate certificate in Astrobiology.

Recently, Elizabeth has been living in Austin, TX and working as a Research Associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. There, she has been working as an affiliate of the REASON instrument on NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission. She is currently taking a one-year “sabbatical” to pursue a postdoctoral scholarship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to bridge her work on planetary environments with research from Earth oceanographers.