Summary: Kip Hodges is the Founding Director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University. He received his undergraduate training in geology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Ph.D. in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a faculty member from 1983 to 2006. While there, he served in a variety of capacities, including Dean for Undergraduate Curriculum, Co-Director of Terrascope (a project-based freshman learning environment), and Co-Director of MIT’s Earth System Initiative (an effort to fuse the modes of analysis of both science and engineering to address environmental issues). For most of his career, Hodges’ research focused on the utilization of a wide variety of geological, geophysical, and geochemical methods to understand the evolution of major mountain systems on Earth. He has conducted extensive field geological research in the Himalaya and Tibet, in the Peruvian Andes, in the North American Cordillera, and in arctic and polar Norway and Greenland. His work in this realm has included over 130 peer-reviewed publications. In recent years, he has turned some of his attention toward planetary science. Dr. Hodges is presently assisting NASA in the development and implementation of a new field geology-training program for its astronauts and he has participated in several NASA-sponsored projects exploring the design of planetary field geology strategies that involve human and robotic explorers. In addition, he and his research team are developing new analytical strategies for the determining the ages of meteorite impact events on Earth and (using the Apollo sample archive) the Moon.
