Adriana Ocampo

Adriana Ocampo was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1955 and moved with her family to Argentina and then the United States as a child. She began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory while still a teenager, taking a summer job that turned into a lifelong career, and went on to study geology and planetary science.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s she became involved in investigating the Chicxulub structure, a vast buried crater centred off the coast of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula that some geologists suspected was the scar left by the asteroid impact linked to the mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Ocampo helped locate and study the crater using satellite imagery and fieldwork, contributing evidence that helped confirm Chicxulub as the impact site, a finding that reshaped scientific understanding of how the extinction happened.

She went on to serve as a program executive and scientist for NASA missions including New Horizons, which carried out the first close flyby of Pluto, and Juno, which studies Jupiter, helping steer the science goals and public communication of major planetary missions.

Throughout her career she has worked to make space science visible to Latin American audiences, translating mission updates and giving talks across the region, arguing that young people there deserved to see themselves represented in space exploration.