Louise Prockter

Louise Prockter is a planetary scientist and former supervisor of the Planetary Exploration Group at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. In 2016 the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) announced the appointment of Dr. Prockter as Director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, Texas, effective September 6, 2016. She is the first woman to serve as LPI Director and succeeds Dr. Stephen J. Mackwell who led the LPI from 2002 to 2016.

Prockter did her undergraduate work at Lancaster University in England and got her Master’s degree from Brown University. She went on to get Ph.D. in planetary geology at Brown University in 1999.

Prockter has worked on a number of NASA missions, both formally and informally. She was on the imaging team for the Galileo Europa Mission (GEM), the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission, and the MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission to Mercury. For the MESSENGER mission, she has served as the Instrument Scientist for the Mercury Dual Imaging System, Co-Investigator, and Deputy Project Scientist.