Hello, my name is Emerson Whittaker (they/them) and I am a planetary scientist. I am currently a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

My scientific studies center around discovering and understanding small bodies within our Solar System, particularly with the goals of protecting Earth from dangerous impacts and understanding the origin of our Solar System and the wonderful life-filled planet we call Earth. I am passionate about teaching science and have enjoyed my UCLA experiences as a teaching assistant for EPS SCI 3: Astrobiology and as an instructor of record for EPS SCI 9: Solar System and Planets. My five-year career goal is to obtain a position where I can continue building my teaching skills and inspiring students to think critically and scientifically about the world around them.

I am originally from Boone, North Carolina, a small mountain town home to Appalachian State University. I took two introductory astronomy classes there with Professor Daniel Caton while still in high school, solidifying my interest in astronomy and my desire to pursue it as a career. During my undergraduate studies, my astronomy advisor Professor Melissa Hayes-Gehrke encouraged me to apply to internships all over the country, including an internship at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. It was there that I first fell in love with asteroids, working with Dr. Patrick Taylor on techniques for measuring asteroid radii using single radar images. I was enchanted by images and models of asteroids like Bennu, strange little worlds occupying physical regimes unlike anywhere else in the solar system, leading to unique features like top shapes and sharp, dark rubble terrain, features we are just beginning to understand.

My graduate research at UCLA spanned three asteroid-related projects. For the first, we focused on understanding the asteroid diameter uncertainties that come with thermally modeling asteroids using only two infrared band observations with the WISE space telescope instead of four. For the second, we shifted and stacked WISE images along the predicted direction of motion of asteroids to uncover thousands of asteroid candidates and to report new detections for thousands of known asteroids. In the last project, we refine the shape model of the moon Squannit around asteroid Moshup and model the rate at which Squannit's orbit is moving away from Moshup, with the publication still in preparation.

At JPL, I am working with Dr. Bonni Buratti on optimizing the near-Earth asteroid thermal model (NEATM) by implementing Lommel-Seeliger dominated scattering to obtain more accurate near-Earth asteroid diameters.

Outside of science, I am also passionate about music. I enjoy playing the cello and the mandolin at my local Lutheran church, and once played the bass guitar in an informal band called "Hard Space Math." I love to learn, and enjoy reading and watching informative videos on topics like philosophy, history, and cooking. I love living in sunny Los Angeles, and enjoy going to the beach, trying new restaurants, and attending local music shows.