Macelwane Medalist Dustin “Dusty” Schroeder is a leader in the science and engineering of ice-penetrating radar, enabling space probes to reveal the secrets of Europa and making discoveries that improve projections of sea level rise from ice sheets here on Earth. He is also a dedicated academic servant and mentor, inspiring and empowering the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Start with a few of the many people Dusty has uplifted. Through more than 20 years of leadership with the National Science Olympiad, including chairing the Earth and Space Science Committee for a decade, he has helped literally hundreds of thousands of diverse students. Dusty has personally advised over a hundred undergrad and high school research students, with dozens having completed Ph.D.’s and many more in the pipeline. They will join the successful, diverse team of Dusty’s graduate advisees who are now faculty members, researchers and industry leaders. As a first-generation college student himself, Dusty is leading several efforts at Stanford and through AGU to empower underrepresented and first-generation low-income students and on promoting civil discourse.

Many of the students flocking to Dusty’s program are captivated by his end-to-end approach, starting from design and construction of transformational instruments, deploying them into space or on Earth, analyzing and modeling the data, making discoveries about the natural world, and disseminating the societally relevant results. For example, Dusty developed radar sounding techniques that are en route to Europa, including using Jupiter’s radio emissions to enable low-resource exploration for these and future missions. His contributions to planetary ice-penetrating radar analysis will illuminate key processes, from ionospheric tomography to ice shell convection and interactions with the global subsurface ocean.

Back on Earth, the long tail on possible future sea level rise from the ice sheets and the distressingly sparse sampling of them require novel approaches. Dusty is leading in numerous ways, including the use of radar echo character, frequency dependence, full-waveform inversion, target-tuned processing, repeat-pass interferometry, polarimetry and time series observations of subsurface conditions. These have resulted in first-ever observations of the transition from distributed to concentrated subglacial water beneath Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica and revealed the sequence of freezing and fracture processes that govern the formation of double ridges on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet (and perhaps Europa). Much of our knowledge still rests on 35 mm film records of extensive radar surveys from the 1970s, so Dusty led the effort to harness Hollywood archival techniques to digitize the entirety of this irreplaceable dataset, improving navigation in many places and making the entire output publicly available in a persistent archive, capturing unexpected details and documenting ongoing changes. He and his students are also leading efforts to develop open-source ice-penetrating radar based on software-defined radios, low-cost fixed-wing drones for autonomous surveying of ice sheets, and fiber-optic-based radar imaging arrays to capture 3D movies of the interior and base of the ice sheet. All of this is “democratizing” access to ever-richer ice-penetrating radar data for the entire cryosphere science community. He has even developed radar sounding techniques using the Sun as a source.

In short, Dusty Schroeder is a community-minded leader and dedicated collaborator advancing the science and engineering of ice-penetrating radar while educating and empowering the next generation of scientists and engineers to solve Earth system problems of societal relevance.

—Richard Alley
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania