People | MIT Glaciology

Principal Investigator

Brent Minchew

Class of 1948 Associate Professor

office: 54-310

phone: 617-324-3704

Brent was born and raised in Texas where he rode horses and raised show pigs. After serving nearly eight years in the Marine Corps, he earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and 2010. As an undergraduate, Brent researched high-energy (~ MJ) electromagnetic launchers at the Institute for Advanced Technology, imagining that the technology might one day be useful for returning samples to Earth from a lunar base. He spent his first two summers of graduate school working with the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researching glacier dynamics and applications of radar remote sensing to marine oil spill response. Through further research on glacier dynamics and kinematic remote sensing, Brent received a PhD in Geophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2016 under the advisement of Mark Simons. He went on to be an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, working with Hilmar Gudmundsson. In January 2018, Brent joined the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in July 2023.

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Research scientists and postdoctoral scholars

Bryan Riel

Research Scientist

office: 54-318

email: briel@mit.edu

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Students

Joanna Millstein

PhD candidate, MIT-WHOI Joint Program

office: 54-313

email: jdmill@mit.edu

Joanna is a graduate student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Geology & Geophysics. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 with a degree in Earth Sciences, where she was introduced to remote sensing techniques and glaciological field work. In her free time, Joanna can be found bicycling or fly fishing.

Meghana Ranganathan

PhD candidate, MIT EAPS (PAOC)

office: 54-313

email: meghanar@mit.edu

Meghana is a graduate student in Climate Science at MIT in the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department. Her work focuses on the mechanics of shear margins in Antarctic ice streams. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2017, where she studied mathematics. She spends most of her time outside of science reading and writing.

Faye Margaret Hendley Elgart

PhD candidate, MIT EAPS (PAOC)

office: 54-313

email: fmhe@mit.edu

Faye is a graduate student in Climate Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is from New York City and graduated from Cornell University in 2016 with a degree in Engineering Physics. She is interested in the dynamics of complex systems spanning multiple length- and time-scales, and the intersection of glaciology, oceanography, and planetary science.