Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña, PhD, is the head of science communication for the University of Colorado Boulder's Climate Adaptation Science Center. She's a national fellow of The Explorers Club and holds a PhD in geological sciences, with a specialization in glaciology. Her research has covered the growth of supraglacial lakes and flooding on Himalayan glaciers, as well as the impacts of pollution and soot falling on snow and ice in high latitudes and altitudes. Ulyana has been the recipient of National Science Foundation and National Geographic grants for her research. By the time she turned 23, she had traveled to and worked on all 7 continents. Ulyana started Science in the Wild, her own citizen science initiative that has traveled to Nepal, Baffin Island, Kilimanjaro, and the Andes. Her husband, Ricardo, and her are climbing Colorado's 100 highest peaks, the 50 US state highpoints, and the global 7 summits as part of their Summits, Songs and Science project, to bring awareness to the importance of fitness, culture, and scientific thinking in modern society. They both feature in a new documentary The Andes Tragedy: 50 Years Later, alongside Eduardo Strauch, one of the 16 survivors of Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes in 1972.  In 2016, Ulyana was chosen as mission commander for the NASA Johnson Space Center's HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) 30-day isolation experiment, simulating a long-duration mission to an asteroid. She was named one of 120 semifinalists out of 18,354 applicants for NASA's 2017 astronaut class. 

Language spoke: English

Photo credit: Isabelle Groc