Director's Biography
Meenakshi Wadhwa joined as the 12th director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego in October 2025, and holds the Charles F. Kennel Director’s Endowed Chair. She also serves as UC San Diego’s Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences and Dean of the School of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
In these roles, Wadhwa leads UC San Diego’s ocean, earth, atmospheric and climate science research and education programs at Scripps Oceanography, the foremost environmental research institution dedicated to understanding and protecting the planet to find solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. Scripps Oceanography trains the next generation of science leaders and partners with government, non-profits and the private sector to translate scientific knowledge to action.
Wadhwa is an award-winning planetary scientist interested in the time scales and processes involved in the formation and evolution of the solar system and planets. She is known for developing novel methodologies for high-precision isotope analyses and the application of high-resolution chronometers for understanding the time scales of events in the early solar system. Wadhwa has also researched the abundance and origin of water and other volatiles on rocky bodies in the solar system.
Prior to joining UC San Diego, Wadhwa served as director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University (ASU) from 2019-2025, overseeing an active research program, graduate and undergraduate educational programs in geosciences, biogeosciences, astrobiology, oceanography, planetary sciences, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, engineering for exploration, and science education. She also held appointments as Regents Professor at ASU, distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and NASA's principal scientist for the Mars Sample Return program, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency to bring samples of Mars to Earth for the first time.
While at ASU, she led the Isotope Cosmochemistry and Geochronology Laboratory. From 2006-2019, she served as the director for the Center for Meteorite Studies, which included management of the world’s largest university-based collection of meteorites. Prior to joining ASU, she spent 11 years as a curator in the Department of Geology at the Field Museum in Chicago.
She has served on numerous advisory committees for NASA and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. She was president of the Meteoritical Society in 2019-2020, and chaired the Science Committee of the NASA Advisory Council from 2018 to 2022, advising NASA leadership on a broad spectrum of Earth and space sciences including astrophysics, planetary science, Earth observation from space, as well as remote sensing and monitoring of climate change indicators and hazards. For her service in this role, she was awarded the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal. She spent five years as a member of the National Academies Space Studies Board, in which leaders from academia and industry provide an independent, authoritative forum for advice to the federal government on all aspects of space science. Wadhwa has also taken part in expeditions of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program, for which she received the Antarctica Service Medal.
She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the J. Lawrence Smith Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Nier Prize of the Meteoritical Society. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Meteoritical Society, as well as a Geochemistry Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry. She also has the distinction of
Asteroid 8356 being named 8356 Wadhwa in recognition of her contributions to meteoritics and planetary science.
She received her doctorate in earth and planetary sciences from Washington University in St. Louis, and her master's and bachelor's degrees in geology from Panjab University in Chandigarh, India.