Michael S. Kelley

Dr. Michael S. Kelley is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Geology and Geography at Georgia Southern University, and a Visiting Astronomer at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii.  He was born in Connecticut and has lived in Washington State, upstate New York, Texas, Georgia, and Virginia.  He received a B.S. in Geophysics from the University of Connecticut (1989), and an M.S. (1995) and a Ph.D. (1999) in Geology from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Dr. Kelley held a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas from 1999 to 2001.  Between 2002 and 2007 he was a Research Scientist and Temporary Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University. 
Dr. Kelley is currently working full time in the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.  He is the Program Scientist for two spacecraft missions (EPOXI and Stardust-NExT), the Planetary Geology and Geophysics R&A Program, the Planetary Data System, and the Small Bodies Assessment Group. 

Research
Areas of concentration in Dr. Kelley's research include mineralogy and geology of asteroids, genetic testing of dynamical asteroid families, and asteroid-meteorite relationships.  He has ongoing projects involving the mineralogy of rare classes of asteroids, and ground-based remote sensing of spacecraft target asteroids.  He is a Visiting Astronomer at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility at Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawai`i, which is the primary facility for the observational portion of his research.  Dr. Kelley led an international team of scientists that performed physical and geochemical analyses of the Statesboro, Georgia meteorite.

Teaching
Dr. Kelley taught directed studies courses, lecture and laboratory sections of Introduction to Earth, laboratory sections of Environmental Geology, and the upper-division Introduction to Research Methods course.  Prior to his tenure at Georgia Southern, he taught Physical Geology laboratory and Optical Mineralogy.  Dr. Kelley has lectured or served as field trip leader in a variety of courses ranging from Astronomy to Volcanology and from Dinosaurs to Origin of Life.

Service
Dr. Kelley was a member of the 2005-2006 Antarctic Search for Meteorites expedition to the Miller Range in Antarctica.  He maintained the team’s weblog during that expedition.  Dr. Kelley served as an officer in the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America (PGD-GSA) from 2002 to 2005.  He chaired the G. K. Gilbert Award Committee, which is a professional career achievement award sponsored by the PGD-GSA.  He also served as chair of the Pellas-Ryder Award Committee, an international award sponsored by the Meteoritical Society and PGD-GSA, and awarded each year to the best, peer-reviewed, planetary science paper published by a student.  Dr. Kelley co-organized the Department's seminar series for several years.  From 1999 to 2003 Dr. Kelley was a member of the program committee for the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and in 2003-2004 he was a member of the Joint Technical Program Committee for the annual GSA meeting.  He served as Technical Program Chair for the record-setting 2007 Southeastern Section GSA Meeting, which was hosted by our Department.  Dr. Kelley has served on many NASA science review panels, and is a regular reviewer for the journals Icarus and Meteoritics and Planetary Science.