Dr. David Brain is an assistant professor in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado. As a planetary scientist, he studies the interaction of unmagnetized planets such as Mars, Venus, and the Moon with their space environment. This topic is exciting to him because charged particles and magnetic fields from the Sun are believed to have fundamentally altered these bodies over the past 4+ billion years. By studying processes that occur there today we hope to unravel how these planets evolved, and why their atmospheres are so different from our own. He is a Co-Investigator for the MAVEN mission to Mars, scheduled to launch in November 2013 and a member of the Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies. He received his Ph.D from the University of Colorado in 2002, and spent 8 years at the University of California Berkeley before hitting the jackpot and returning to CU.
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