Susan Kieffer

"2014 Penrose Medal Presented to Susan Werner Kieffer"

"I think the basic motivation for my research and publishing papers in the conventional media is curiosity."

"Our collective work in the geosciences has made, and must continue to make, a difference in how humans interact with our planet."

"The problem is that the attention span of humans as individuals is a year or two. If you have a disaster, you basically have a year or two to try to change human behavior, and then interest fades"

"One of the things I discovered in writing my book, The Dynamics of Disaster, was the thrill of learning about completely new things that my research would never ever have taken me into."

"I think the only thing that has a broader range of scales than geology is astronomy. Geologists really look at things from the atomic scale to the solar system scale, and we potentially think about planets beyond the solar system."