Ulyana Horodyskyj

Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña, PhD, is the head of science communication for the University of Colorado Boulder’s Climate Adaptation Science Center. She’s a national fellow of The Explorers Club and has a PhD in geological sciences, with a specialization in glaciology. Her research has covered the growth of supraglacial lakes and flooding on Himalayan glaciers, as well as the impacts of pollution and soot falling on snow and ice in high latitudes and altitudes, including Svalbard, Greenland, western Antarctica, the Himalaya, Alps and Andes. Ulyana has been the recipient of National Science Foundation, National Geographic, USAID, NASA, The Explorers Club, and PONANT Science grants for her research. By the time she turned 23, she had traveled to and worked on all 7 continents. Ulyana started Science in the Wild, her own participatory science initiative that has traveled to Nepal, Baffin Island, Kilimanjaro, and the Andes. In 2016, Ulyana was chosen as mission commander for NASA Johnson Space Center’s HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) 30-day isolation experiment, simulating a long-duration mission to an asteroid. She was named one of 120 semifinalists out of over 18,000 applicants for NASA’s 2017 astronaut class.