Jani Radebaugh has been a professor of geological sciences at Brigham Young University since 2006. She is a planetary scientist and a Science Team Member for the NASA Dragonfly rotorcraft lander mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, and she was involved in the Cassini and Galileo Missions and the Io Volcano Observer mission proposal. Professor Radebaugh explores the Saharan, Arabian and Namib deserts with her students to study giant sand dunes to compare them with those on Titan.
She studies lakes of lava in the Ethiopian Afar valley and Vanuatu in the southwest Pacific, as well as the recent eruption in Iceland, to compare them with active lava lakes of Jupiter’s moon Io.
She has been funded by NASA to study yardangs, or wind-carved ridges in Argentina in order to compare them with similar features on Mars, and she is now funded by NASA to examine cold dunes in Alaska, also for Mars comparisons.
She’s a regular presence on the Science/Discovery program How the Universe Works, the NASA Unexplained Files and BBC and Nova programs and she has been an invited speaker for the U.S. State Department in South Korea, the Spacefest Convention, TedX BYU, University-wide Forums at BYU and BYU-Idaho and at New York City’s Hayden Planetarium. She has spoken at many universities, astronomy and religious organizations and regularly for the Traverse Mountain 6th grade.
