Darby Dyar

Darby Dyar earned her B.A. from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. for geochemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute as well as the Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Astronomy at Mount Holyoke College and a member of the Graduate Faculty at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. Dyar is a mineralogist and spectroscopist interested in a wide range of problems relating to the evolution of the solar system. She studies the redox state of iron and the abundance of hydrogen in solar system materials using Mössbauer, x-ray absorption, and FTIR spectroscopy. Dyar has pioneered use of machine learning tools to interpret spectroscopic data.