10 Female Scientists of Color You Should Know

A team examining a large boulder during a 1998 expedition to the Yucatán, led by Dr. Adriana Ocampo (Photo via NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Adriana Ocampo

Adriana Ocampo was born in 1955 in Colombia, raised partially in Argentina, and then moved to the United States when she was fifteen. Fascinated by space from a young age, she quickly became a volunteer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She later became an employee while in college.

Ocampo earned a Master of Science degree in planetary geology from California State University, Northridge, in 1997. She has since received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

Ocampa now works for NASA as a Program Executive. She played instrumental roles in several space probe missions, including Galileo, the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the recent Juno mission that is now in orbit around Jupiter. In 2016, she was named the National Hispanic Scientist of the Year by the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Florida.

Her Master’s research helped lead to the discovery of the Chicxulub impact crater underneath Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. In 1989, Ocampo had been studying images of the Yucatán peninsula and spotted geological features that indicated a massive impact.

The impact that created Chicxulub 65 million years ago has been pinpointed as the likely cause of the mass extinction event that killed nearly three-quarters of all animal and plant life on earth, including the majority of dinosaur species. It is the third-largest impact structure discovered on Earth; the asteroid that created it was estimated to have been at least six miles in diameter.

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