Piers
Sellers
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Winner of the 2016 Nordberg Award |
Piers Sellers is currently Deputy Director of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate and Acting Director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA/GSFC.
He was born and educated in the United Kingdom and moved to the U.S. in 1982 to carry out climate research at NASA/GSFC. From 1982 to 1996, he worked on global climate problems, particularly those involving interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and was involved in constructing computer models of the global climate system, satellite data interpretation and conducting large-scale field experiments in the USA, Canada, Africa, and Brazil.
He served as project scientist for the first large Earth Observing System platform, Terra, launched in 1998.
He has published over 70 papers, 30 of them as first author. His H-index is 49.
He joined the NASA astronaut corps in 1996 and flew to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2002, 2006, and 2010, carrying out six spacewalks and working on ISS assembly tasks.
He returned to GSFC in June, 2011.