Dr. Ulyana Horodyskyj is a visiting assistant professor at Colorado College (Colorado Springs, CO), teaching undergraduate courses in global climate change, energy, and alpine environments. After receiving her Ph.D. in geological sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder (May 2015), focusing on glacial changes in the high Himalaya of Nepal, she completed a post-doc at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Partially funded by a National Geographic grant, she and a team composed of PoSSUM’s director, Dr. Jason Reimuller, and PoSSUM graduate, Mr. Jorge Rufat-Latre, ventured to the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island, to understand the impacts of pollution on snowmelt in the Arctic.

Ulyana founded Science in the Wild in 2016, an adventure citizen science initiative aimed at getting ordinary people out on extraordinary experiences around the world while contributing to science. Thus far, teams have traveled to Nepal, Africa (Kilimanjaro), and South America (Aconcagua in Argentina and Ojos del Salado in Chile). During the Ojos del Salado expedition, teams took part in field campaigns meant to simulate Martian geologic surveys, given the locations in the remote and harsh Atacama Desert. In September/October 2016, Ulyana was chosen as mission commander for a NASA Johnson Space Center simulated mission to an asteroid (the human exploration research analog (HERA) program) and was named in the top 120 semifinalists for the 2017 NASA astronaut program.