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.