Brent Garry is a geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where he studies lava flows and volcanoes on Earth and compares them with similar landscapes on the Moon and Mars. He holds geology degrees from The College of William and Mary and the University of Kentucky, and a PhD from the University at Buffalo. He joined NASA in 2012 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Today, Brent serves as project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), NASA’s satellite mapping the Moon, and for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, coordinating science operations for missions on the lunar surface. Earlier in his career, he was a participating scientist on NASA’s Dawn mission to asteroid Vesta and supported the LRO mission, bringing a broad perspective on how rocky worlds are shaped over time. He also served on NASA’s Desert RATS team, living in prototype lunar rovers in Arizona for up to two weeks during simulated expeditions to the Moon.

A seasoned field geologist, Brent has worked in volcanic regions across the U.S., including Hawai‘i, California, New Mexico, Idaho, and Oregon, as well as internationally in Iceland, the Galápagos, the Caribbean, and along the East Pacific Rise. Since 2014, he has traveled with Smithsonian Journeys as an expert, including several tours to Australia and New Zealand. When he’s not in the field, Brent enjoys spending time with his family and scuba diving.