Dr. Hope Ishii

Hope Ami Ishii is a Researcher and tenured faculty in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Director of the Advanced Electron Microscopy Center where she oversees the facility and staff. Dr. Ishii studies fine-grained astromaterials at the nano- and micro-meter scales using advanced microscopy methods. Her research group’s current interests include space weathering in regolith samples returned from asteroids and the Moon by NASA and JAXA; processes of early solar system formation recorded in materials from undifferentiated small solar system bodies, like comets and primitive asteroids; and potential repositories of interstellar dust and its processing. Dr. Ishii in an author of ~50 research articles published or accepted in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Ishii has distinguished herself as a leader in her field. For her outstanding contributions to the field of meteoritics, she was elected in 2020 as a Meteoritical Society Fellow. She was invited to serve as an Associate Editor for Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, a well-respected planetary science journal. Dr. Ishii was selected as the Deputy Sub-team Leader for asteroid Ryugu small grain analysis for the JAXA Hayabusa 2 Mission and is also a Science Team Member for the NASA ANGSA program analyzing recently opened Apollo mission samples. She is a member of the Scientific Committee for the Meteoritical Society, now planned for 2022, and served on the Program Committee of a prior Meteoritical Society meeting. She has been invited to speak at the Goldschmidt Conference, Microscopy and Microanalysis Meeting, a Keck Institute for Space Studies workshop and the Advanced Light Source User Meeting, among others. She was elected to the four-year Chair line of the Far West Section of the American Physical Society representing California, Hawaii and Nevada and is currently Chair-Elect.

Dr. Ishii has also participated in NASA programs in many capacities and is knowledgeable on the current Science Plan and Decadal Survey. She served on the Preliminary Examination team for the Stardust mission and the Science Teams of two subsequent proposed NASA missions. As Vice Chair of the new Extraterrestrial Materials Analysis Group, Dr. Ishii serves the broader astromaterials research and analysis community. She is also Chair of the Microparticle Allocation Panel within NASA’s Astromaterials Allocation Review Board. Dr. Ishii previously served in multiple roles in NASA’s Curation and Analysis Planning Team for Extraterrestrial Materials. She has been a NASA PI in multiple Planetary Science R&A programs within SMD continuously since 2007 and has served on and chaired NASA review panels for those programs. She is familiar with the Decadal Survey and is lead-author on a white paper and co-author on others submitted to the ongoing NASEM Decadal Survey (2023-2032). Dr. Ishii was educated at Cornell, in Sweden, and Stanford, and is the first doctorate on both sides of her family.