Geology grad Mittlefehldt will receive honorary doctorate

David Mittlefehldt, a scientist at the NASA/Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, has been selected by the State University of New York Board of Trustees to receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree at the SUNY Fredonia Commencement on Saturday, May 12.

He will be the commencement speaker at the 10 a.m. ceremony. Dr. Mittlefehldt graduated summa cum laude with a geology degree from Fredonia in 1973. He is a resident of Houston, Texas.

Throughout his career, Dr. Mittlefehldt has received prestigious awards and recognition for his work studying the formation of meteorites and how they relate to the early history of the solar system. He determined the Martian origin of a rock that made international news in 1996 as the possible bearer of Martian bacterial remains. Read in Science News about Dr. Mittlefehldt's discovery of the rock from Mars.

In that same year, he was elected a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society. Since 2005, he has served as a member of the Athena Science Team for the Mars Exploration Rover.

In honor of his work in tracing the origins of minor and major planets, the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet after him in 2003.

Previously at Fredonia, he was honored with the Alumni Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award. He has contributed significantly to opportunities for students at SUNY Fredonia, both by returning to campus to speak with students about his work and by contributing financially to the scholarship programs in geology.
 

Originally from Jamestown, N.Y., Dr. Mittlefehldt completed his Ph.D. in Geochemistry in 1978 from the University of California, Los Angeles, and then traveled to Israel as a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Research for one year and next as a lecturer in geology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be-er Sheva for six years.

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1985, he was named a National Research Council-NASA Research Associate to pursue research on the origin of igneous meteorites at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. After that, he went on to a highly successful 12-year career with Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Co. in Houston, before returning to the Astromaterials Research Office of Johnson Space Center in 2000.

In 1997, 2001 and 2004 he was a field team member on the NASA/National Science Foundation Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program, spending three two-month collection seasons in Antarctica.