About the Speaker
Maria Zuber is the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and presidential advisor for science and technology policy at MIT, tracking trends and seizing opportunities to inform and advance enlightened state and federal policy. She also provides strategic direction to campus labs, centers, and initiatives connected to defense or national security and represents MIT with external stakeholders.
Zuber served as vice president for research from 2013 to 2024, and was responsible for research administration and policy, research relationships with the federal government, and oversight of MIT Lincoln Laboratory and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research laboratories and centers. In that role, she led the team that developed and provided oversight for MIT's Climate Action Plan.
Zuber’s research bridges planetary geophysics and the technology of space‐based laser and radio systems. Since 1990, she has held leadership roles associated with a dozen scientific experiments or instrumentation on ten NASA missions, most notably serving as Principal Investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. Zuber currently serves as Chair of the Standing Review Board of NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission.
Zuber holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an Sc.M. and Ph.D. from Brown. She has won numerous awards, including the MIT James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the MIT faculty bestows to one of its own. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, the Royal Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union. In 2019, she was awarded the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize by the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. Zuber is the first woman to lead a science department at MIT and the first to lead a NASA planetary mission.
In 2004, appointed by President George W. Bush, she served on the Presidential Commission on the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy. In 2002 Discover magazine named her one of the 50 most important women in science and, in 2008 she was named to the USNews/Harvard Kennedy School List of America’s Best Leaders. In 2013, President Obama appointed her to the National Science Board, and in 2018 she was reappointed by President Trump and served as Board Chair during the first Trump administration. In 2021, then President-elect Biden named her as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
