
Dan Berman
Senior Scientist
Professional History
25 years ago, after graduating with a BS in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Michigan, I moved across the country to begin working as a research assistant for Bill Hartmann at PSI in Tucson. Back then, PSI only had 6 staff scientists and was located in an old converted house with bad wiring and faulty air conditioning. Bill taught me the ins and outs of planetary image datasets and crater counting, and I quickly became indispensable to him (especially when it came to dealing with computers) and we began publishing papers together. We primarily worked on new data from the Mars Global Surveyor on a number of projects involving geologically young terrains on Mars. A couple years later, I entered graduate school at the University of Arizona to pursue my Master's degree in Geosciences, with the intent to become a full-time staff scientist at PSI. I continued working part-time at PSI during my studies, and I published my first paper as first author with Bill based on work in one of my graduate classes in 2002. Around that time I also began doing work with Dr. David Crown and his associates. After graduate school, I was hired by PSI full-time as a Research Associate. My graduate thesis led to my second first-author paper in 2005, with David Crown, Bill Hartmann, and my graduate advisor Vic Baker. I began involvement in a larger number of projects with various researchers such as Becky Williams, Matt Balme, Mary Bourke, and Alexis Rodriguez. I later applied to be a full Associate Research Scientist so that I could submit proposals as PI. My work with Matt Balme on aeolian features on Mars led to a first author paper, and my first funded proposal from NASA's Mars Data Analysis program. Once that project was funded, I was promoted to full Research Scientist and made a permanent member of the science staff. The next year, I was awarded a grant to produce my first geologic map of Mars through the USGS, which was published in 2021. I continue to work with a large number of PSI researchers on bodies such as Mars, the Moon, Vesta, Ceres, and Eros, doing crater counts, geologic mapping, and geomophologic analyses. I was promoted to Senior Scientist in 2018.