Assessment and Mitigation of Asteroid Impact Hazards

Maria Gritsevich is a Senior Scientist at the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki (UH), currently working for the ERC Advanced project SAEMPL 'Scattering and absorption of electromagnetic waves in particulate media' (PI Prof. Karri Muinonen). Prior to coming to UH, she was appointed as a Senior Scientist at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, at the Ural Federal University and at the Russian Academy of Sciences. She has also worked as a research fellow at the European Space Agency (ESA/ESTEC, with an international ESA fellowship granted to only one researcher a year), and as a Specialist Research Scientist at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute. She obtained her M.Sc. degree (with high honors) at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (2007), where in the following two years she also completed her Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics. She gained crucial research experience by joining international collaborative projects, such as FP7 RASTAS SPEAR 'RAdiation-Shapes Thermal protection investigAtionS for high-SPeed EArth Re-entry', and EuroPlaNet. She received the International Academic Publishing Company 'Nauka/Interperiodica' and the Pleiades Publishing Inc. best journal publication in Physics and Mathematics award in 2009. She was awarded the Gold Medal for young scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2010.

Formerly a Professor of Mineralogy and Geochemistry at the Universität zu Köln, Institute of Mineralogy and Geochemistry, Dr. Palme has been a 1986 Fellow of the Meteoritical Society and a 2002 Fellow of the Geochemical Society. He was awarded the 2003 Leonard Medal of the Meteoritical Society, the 2006 Urey Medal of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry, and the 2011 Abraham-Gottlob-Werner Medaille der Deutschen Mineralogischen Gesellschaft. Now he works as a research volunteer at the Research Institute and Museum of Nature Senckenberg.