Kayla Duarte is a third year EAS major concentrating in planetary science and will be graduating in May 2019. She has been working on NASA’s Dawn Mission with Dr. Britney Schmidt since her freshman year studying geomorphological features on dwarf planet Ceres and the role of ground ice in its subsurface. She has a first-authored paper in revision pertaining to an intermediate class of landslides identified on Ceres, and recently gave a talk at the Division of Planetary Sciences Annual Meeting in Knoxville, TN on her current research involving potential ground ice related features in Occator crater on Ceres.

During her time at Georgia Tech, Kayla was awarded both the Rutt S. Bridges Undergraduate Research Award and the President’s Undergraduate Research Award. She was also a member of Lambda Sigma Honor Society, a sophomore-only honor fraternity.

In her spare time, she enjoys spending hours in the kitchen creating organic cosmetics, playing guitar, and skateboarding.