The Northern Rockies

Howard Topoff and Carol Simon are biologists specializing in the fields of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology. After receiving their Ph.D. degrees, they spent their scientific careers as professors at The City University of New York, and as Research Associates at The American Museum of Natural History. Their field research on animal behavior is conducted in Central and South America, Africa, and the southwestern corner of the United States. As study leaders on Natural History tours for over 35 years, they have developed an extensive series of educational and entertaining multimedia presentations, which they offer to vacationing guests who enjoy location-specific enrichment programs.

Maria Banks is a geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where she studies geologic processes landforms on Earth and compares them to similar features on Mars, Mercury, and the Moon. She earned a PhD in geology and planetary science from the University of Arizona and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum from 2009-2014.  Prior to NASA, she worked at the Planetary Science Institute for three years. Maria has conducted fieldwork in Alaska, Iceland, Hawaii, and across the contiguous United States. Growing up in upstate New York, she developed a passion for studying the glaciated landscapes of North America, which inspired her dissertation on glacial landforms and processes on Earth and Mars. She lived and worked on the West Antarctic ice sheet for three months during an ice core-drilling expedition.  

Maria enjoys working with the science teams for NASA missions including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) as well as the Phoenix Mars and InSight Missions that landed on Mars. She was the project scientist for the NASA instruments aboard the Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon in 2025. For the 2026 Artemis II mission, she served as vehicle camera science lead and helped train the astronauts for the science investigations they would conduct on the Moon.

Maria is also a professional harpist who has traveled around the world three times performing on music tours and on cruise ships. During college she also explored her interests in marine biology working at the Mystic Aquarium, the home to the largest outdoor beluga whale habitat in the U.S. In her spare time, Maria enjoys hiking and scuba diving.

Dr. Arianna Soldati is a volcanologist and science communicator who has been fascinated with volcanoes since early childhood. With a focus on the dynamics of lava flows and their interaction with the built environment, her work takes her to field sites all over the world: from Hawaii to Iceland, from La Réunion to La Palma, and from Costa Rica to New Zealand. Arianna was selected as the 2023-2024 Geological Society of America’s Science Communication Fellow. In that role, she made the latest geological discoveries published in academic journals accessible to the general public. She has delivered over 50 public lectures, led countless science engagement activities, and funded her own traveling outreach program. Currently, Arianna is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.

Katryn Wiese is a professor of geology, paleontology, and oceanography with 30 years of experience in research, teaching, field explorations, and community outreach. She studied at Caltech, Oregon State University, and Stanford University, and focused her early research on volcanic processes in Iceland, Hawaii, the seafloor around the Azores and the Galápagos Islands, and the tablelands of Eastern Australia. She has journeyed around the world as a scientist and field guide including the Americas, Antarctica, the Arctic, Australia, Europe, and the islands of the Pacific.

Katryn’s primary focus is engaging students of all ages and backgrounds in exploring natural phenomena, from reading the stories in the rocks to evaluating the impact of the Earth and its oceans on our climate, culture, and society. She shares that work through her Earth Rocks! YouTube video channel, her library of open-source earth science lessons and lab manuals, and also through the “Story of Time and Life”—a four-floor exhibit of dinosaurs, fossils, and meteorites that she installed and curates at City College of San Francisco in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences. She recently joined the faculty at the College of San Mateo, near her home on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Katryn is an avid hiker and kayaker, and is most at home outdoors exploring erupting volcanoes, glacially carved fjords, fossil and mineral sites, and natural spaces off the beaten path.

Patrick Burkhart received his doctorate from Lehigh University and has been a professor of geology for several decades. His expertise lies in the science of groundwater, while he also holds a deep passion for geomorphology, the study of landscapes. He revels in the history of exploration, with particular focus upon the quests of Ernest Shackleton and Charles Darwin—the latter of whom he has written and lectured about extensively. He has an affinity for the cryosphere—frozen places at high latitude and high altitude.