Paul Spudis

Paul D. Spudis (born 1952) is an American geologist and lunar scientist.
In 1976 he earned a B.S. in geology at the Arizona State University. Following his graduation he performed an internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during the Mars landing of that year. The following year he went to Brown University to study planetary geology, with a focus on the Moon. A year later he earned his Masters Degree and moved back to Arizona where he started working for Ron Greeley who had just joined Arizona State University. In 1982 he earned a Ph.D. in geology at the university.
After graduation he went to work for the U.S. Geological Survey. In the following years he spent in lunar studies and promoting the idea of lunar exploration. He became a principal investigator at the NASA Office of Space Science, Solar System Exploration Division planetary geology program. His specialty is in the study of volcanism and impact processes on the planets, including Mercury and Mars.
He later joined Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston as a staff scientist. Eventually he joined the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and became senior staff scientist. He returned to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston in 2008 and is currently a Senior Staff Scientist there.
He has served as a member of the Synthesis Group in Washington D.C., a White House committee, in 1991. In 1994 he was the deputy leader of the Clementine mission science team. He has also served on numerous science advisory committees. At Johns Hopkins' APL, he developed an imaging radar system for the Indian mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-1. He was a member of the 2004 Presidential Commission on the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy. He is a team member of the Mini-RF experiment on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission.
Spudis is well known as a leading advocate of a return to the Moon to utilize its resources to establish and supply a cislunar space transportation system.
Dr. Spudis is married to Anne M. (Seaborne) Spudis.
The inner main-belt asteroid 7560 Spudis is named in honor of Paul Spudis.