Oleg Abramov

Professional History

Dr. Oleg Abramov's journey into planetary sciences was sparked by an early fascination with space, particularly the accessible bodies within our solar system. Overcoming the challenges of immigrating to the U.S. and navigating academia as the first in his family to attend a U.S. university, he earned a bachelor's degree in Biology from Clarkson University in 1998 and a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences from the University of Arizona in 2006. His doctoral research included thermal and hydrothermal modeling of large impact craters. In a postdoctoral position at the Southwest Research Institute in 2006, Dr. Abramov applied his thermal modeling skills to the icy surfaces of Europa and Enceladus. He then developed a computer code to simulate the thermal effects of impact bombardments during a three-year appointment at the University of Colorado as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow in 2007. His career further evolved as a Urey Fellow at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in 2010, where Dr. Abramov developed thermal models for asteroids, and as a Research Space Scientist at the USGS Astrogeology branch in 2011, where his work expanded to include field work in remote environments, contributions to spaceflight simulation missions, and involvement in the NASA Europa Clipper mission. After joining the Planetary Science Institute in 2016, Dr. Abramov conducted modeling of impacts and impact bombardments on Mercury, Moon, Mars, and exoplanets, co-developed a lunar regolith formation model, and contributed to the development of the E-THEMIS instrument on Europa Clipper.

Figure 2. Expected age distribution of the Earth's crust derived from an impact bombardment model. From Abramov and Mojzsis (2020).