Maria T. Zuber

Maria T. Zuber was born on June 27, 1958, in Norristown, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, in Pennsylvania's Coal Region, one of five children of Joseph and Dolores (Stoffa) Zuber. She has three brothers, Joseph Jr., Stephen, and Andrew (1966–2018), and a sister, Joanne. Both her grandfathers were coal miners who contracted black lung disease.

Zuber was the first person in her family to attend college. She received her B.A. in astronomy and geology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980. She earned Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in geophysics from Brown University, in 1983 and 1986 respectively, with advisor Marc Parmentier. Reflecting on her decision to apply to Ivy League graduate schools and not MIT, Zuber joked "I remember saying, I don't want to go to any nerd school... and of course, I'm the biggest nerd there is."

Zuber was a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, then became a professor of geophysics at Johns Hopkins University in 1991. She joined the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1995 and was the head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences from 2003 to 2012. From 2012, she was vice president for research at MIT, where she also held the position of the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. She was the first woman to lead a science department at MIT and, as principal investigator of GRAIL, the first woman to lead a robotic planetary mission for NASA.

Zuber has made numerous theoretical and experimental contributions toward understanding the structure and tectonics of solid Solar System objects, including the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. In particular, she has pioneereed the use of gravity and laser altimetry in the measurement of the surface shapes of the inner planets, and the interpretation of these measurements in terms of internal structure and dynamics, thermal history, and surface-atmosphere interactions. Her theoretical work has included modeling lithospheric deformations and instabilities. She revised models of lunar structure and thermal history with data from Clementine, and made precise measurements of the Moon's crust with GRAIL. She made measurements of the crust of Mars with the Mars Global Surveyor, producing a theory of the planet's geodynamics. She contributed to the three-dimensional model of 433 Eros reconstructed from NEAR Shoemaker observations. Zuber has also been involved with the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, MESSENGER, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Dawn (spacecraft), the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Psyche (spacecraft).

Zuber worked with Sally Ride to include in the GRAIL mission components that would capture the imagination of young students, inspired in part by a desire to spread her own childhood enthusiasm. A student contest provided the names for the mission's two spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, and students can sign up to use GRAIL's Moon Knowledge Acquired (MoonKAM) by Middle school students.