The Explorer's Club has taken notice of Washington University Associate Professor Paul Byrne's research and exploration of planets beyond the one we inhabit.
The Explorer's Club recognizes 50 individuals each year in order to highlight innovation and research in the fields of science and exploration. The club's EC50 list was created in 2021 in order to challenge the traditional ways in which the world has thought about exploration and pose the question What do the next 100 years of exploration look like?
This year Associate Professor Paul Byrne was chosen as one of the EC50. Byrne's research focuses on comparative planetary geology. In late March 2023, Byrne and Rebecca Hahn published a study in JGR Planets with a new map of 85,000 volcanoes on Venus. In September 2023, Byrne appeared on the podcast "Dead Planets Society" to discuss the habitability of Venus. Byrne has also been leading a team of scientists and engineers to design a mission to Venus that could help study the planet's atmosphere, surface, and possibly the interior. It is his boundary-pushing ideas, research, and design that landed him in this year's class of explorers, the 2024 EC50.
To read more about the EC50 and see the other awardees, visit the webpage here.
