Maria Zuber

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Vice President for Research & E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics

Maria Zuber is the Vice President for Research and E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at MIT, where she is responsible for research administration and policy. She oversees MIT Lincoln Laboratory and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research laboratories and centers. She also oversees MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade and is responsible for intellectual property; research integrity and compliance; research relationships with the federal government; and postdoctoral scholars and research staff. Zuber has held leadership roles associated with a dozen scientific experiments or instrumentation on ten NASA missions, serving as Principal Investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. She is the first woman to lead a science department at MIT and the first to lead a NASA planetary mission. Zuber holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an Sc.M. and Ph.D. from Brown. She is a member of the National Academy of Science, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2021, President-elect Biden named Zuber as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). In 2013, President Obama appointed Zuber to the National Science Board; she was reappointed by President Trump in 2018.