Dr. Charlene Estrada

Dr. Charlene Estrada has studied geosciences in the fields of mineralogy, geochemistry, and paleontology for 15 years. In 2009, she received her B.S. in Geosciences at the University of Arizona where she worked for 3 years as a student laboratory technician at the RRUFF Project. She completed her graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where she studied hydrothermal minerals and their role on the emergence of life, by earning an MA and PhD in Earth & Planetary Sciences in 2011 and 2014 respectively. She has researched prebiotic chemistry as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Akron, the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and studied early fossils of Arizona and hydrothermal reactions at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. There, her team made arrived at the top 33 in the National Science Foundation 2026 Idea Machine competition for the “Big Idea” Geomimicry. She now teaches full-time as a geosciences professor at South Mountain Community College on a year-to-year basis.