Short bio


Tomasz Stepinski is a staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, Texas, USA. He is a native of Poland, where he has obtained a master degree in astrophysics from the Department of Physics,  Warsaw University. His master thesis was on light variations of Be stars and was supervised by Bohdan Paczynski. After graduation he worked at the Polish Academy of Science N. Copernicus Astronomical Center as a research assistant.  He left Poland in 1980 to pursue further education at the University of Arizona. At UofA Tom enrolled into the Program in Applied Mathematics while doing research at the Department of Planetary Science. He has obtained a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1986. His PhD thesis, supervised by Eugene H. Levy, was on generation of magnetic field in astrophysical disk. He has continued at UofA as a post doc until 1990 when he moved to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, TX. In September 2010 Tom will assume the position of the Thomas Jefferson Endowed Chair of Space Exploration in the Department of Geography at the University of Cincinnati.

Research interest


Tom's changing research interest over the years could be succinctly described by a tagline: “Doing astro/geo science by innovative computing.” He has contributed to many different topics, starting from the models of protoplanetary disks, through extrasolar planets, to Martian and terrestrial geomorphology.  The constant theme of his research has always been an application of an original computational approach. Tom considers himself a prototypical interdisciplinary scientist seeking and enjoying collaboration with colleagues from a broad range of disciplines. His most recent interest centers around automating a process of extracting knowledge from planetary and terrestrial spatial data. He uses machine learning and data mining methods to develop techniques for automatic surveys of landforms such as craters or Martian valley networks, and for automating generation of geomorphic maps for topogragraphic data. He is also interested in application of association analysis to geo-spatial data.

Places

Department of Physics at Warsaw University. Physics and astronomy have been present in Warsaw University since its very foundation, in 1816.  More ...

The Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences was founded in 1978 thanks to help from the American astronomical community. CAMK was one of the pioneers of numerical computing methods, networks and Internet in Poland. More ...

Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Mathematics at the University of Arizona is a highly regarded graduate program. More ...

Department of Planetary Science at the University of Arizona is a major center for research in planetary science. More ...

Lunar and Planetary Institute was established during the Apollo missions to foster international collaboration in space science. More ...