Dr. James B. Garvin is the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. As such, he provides strategic advice and analysis on Goddard's scientific priorities and directions to the center director and senior leadership, as well as to NASA Headquarters. Dr. Garvin is also the principal investigator of NASA's DAVINCI mission to Venus.
As a veteran Earth and planetary scientist within NASA in a career that has spanned more than 40 years, Dr. Garvin brings his experience with interdisciplinary science and instrumentation in helping to direct the scientific trajectory of Goddard. Prior to coming to Goddard, Dr. Garvin served as NASA's chief scientist, advising three separate administrators on issues ranging from science strategies associated with the Vision for Space Exploration to those involved in rebalancing the NASA science portfolio, including Mars.
Previously, Dr. Garvin served as the chief scientist for Mars exploration from 2000 until 2004 and spearheaded the development of the scientific strategy that led NASA to select such missions as the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Phoenix polar lander, and the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity rover) and others. He received two NASA Outstanding Leadership Medals for his work with the science behind the Mars Exploration Program. He is also the recipient of three Presidential Rank Awards for his contributions to science at NASA spanning his career.
Dr. Garvin's scientific expertise spans several cross-disciplinary aspects of Earth and planetary sciences. He served as one of the founding fathers of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) experiment and led the scientific investigation of impact cratering processes for Mars using MOLA topographic data. Garvin also served as the principal investigator on the two flights of the Shuttle Laser Altimeter (SLA) experiment on STS-72 and STS-85 missions, from which the first measurements of tree heights from space were achieved. He has been an active co-investigator on the Canadian Space Agency's RADARSAT series of missions (including RCM), using the SAR images from this mission to document the 1996 catastrophic outburst flood in Iceland and the landscape dynamics on newly formed oceanic islands in Tonga (HTHH 2021-2022). His scientific expertise includes the geology and geophysics of impact craters, the geomorphology of oceanic islands, and the geometric properties of sedimentary systems on Mars, Venus, and the Moon.
Dr. Garvin has participated in expeditions to various terrestrial impact sites, including the Zhamanshin impact crater in Kazakhstan and he has led more than a dozen aircraft laser remote-sensing campaigns to such targets as Iceland, Azores, Meteor Crater in Arizona, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Rainier and islands in the Caribbean. He served as NASA's project scientist for the Earth System Science Pathfinder program during the first five years of its existence, during which GRACE and Calipso/Cloudsat missions were selected.
Dr. Garvin also led a team of scientists who employed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to explore the lunar surface at ultraviolet wavelengths in search of potential resources in support of human exploration of the Moon. He has served NASA as a member of Sally Ride's post-Challenger leadership team, and chaired the 1999-2001 NASA Decadal Planning Team (for Exploration), as well as the requirements definition team for the 2008 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission as NASA program scientist. During his career, he has been a co-investigator on the Mars Observer, Mars Global Surveyor, NEAR-Shoemaker, Radarsat-1,2/RCM, Mars Curiosity Rover, OSIRIS-REx, Mars InSight, and ENVISAT missions. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles and other popular articles about space exploration of Mars, Venus, and the Moon.
Dr. Garvin earned his Ph.D in the Geological Sciences from Brown University in 1984 under the mentorship of Professors J. W. Head III and T. A. Mutch. He also received an M.S. in Computer Sciences from Stanford University, and a second M.S. from Brown in Planetary Geosciences. He graduated with highest honors from Brown in 1978 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 2005, Brown awarded Dr. Garvin the prestigious William Rogers award for his contributions to society via science.
Dr. Garvin has frequently appeared on television in association with space exploration, including "Late Night with David Letterman" in January 2004, as well as on the Discovery Channel's "Alien Planet." In September 2023, he co-hosted the NASA Live TV coverage of the return of samples from the asteroid Bennu, for which he was awarded a Webby in 2024. He lives with his wife Cindy and their two children in Columbia, Maryland, where he enjoys walking in the woods with his family and dog, searching for amazing fungi. According to his family, he was "hooked on space at birth" and has been collecting rocks and space data ever since.
As a career NASA scientist, he longs for the time when he can wander across the wild primeval landscapes of Iceland or on volcanoes in Tonga with his family searching for Venus or Mars on Earth.