Rebecca Jolitz

Her full name is Rebecca Dawn Jolitz. In the acknowledgements of her doctoral thesis she names her parents, William and Lynne, and her sister, Autumn.⁠[1][2]

The acknowledgements relate that as a fourth grader she said she wanted to become an astrophysicist and that her parents gave her a C-5 telescope of her own; Yvonne Pendleton had corresponded with her and encouraged her since she was in fourth grade.⁠[2]

She thanks her parents for finding a way for her to leave middle school and attend classes at Ohlone College, a community college, for which they spent up to three hours a day in traffic; she adds that they taught her to invent, to pitch, to challenge conventions and to see projects through.⁠[2]

The acknowledgements add that a third-place science fair prize from the American Chemical Society brought her to a talk by Chris McKay on perchlorates on Mars, and that Chris McKay went on to mentor her and gave her the opportunity to work at Ames.⁠[2]

A post that Lynne Jolitz published on her blog, Lynne’s Take on Tech, on June 10, 2010 calls space exploration a family tradition of the Jolitz clan. It states that William L. Jolitz developed transponders and thin and thick films for many spacecraft at Ford Aerospace, some of which were still transmitting telemetry long after his death; that his son William worked as a high school intern at NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry-Ames on an oscillating secondary mirror for the Kuiper Airborne Observatory; and that Rebecca Jolitz, Ben Jolitz and Sarah Jolitz are William L. Jolitz’s three grandchildren.⁠[3]

The same post relates that Ben Jolitz and Rebecca Jolitz met Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry, the founder of SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry, at the 2007 Mars Society Conference held at UCLA and were inspired by his vision and determination, and that it was at that conference that Ben Jolitz decided he wanted to major in physics at UCLA.⁠[3]

The post states that, though still in high school, the two had received an honorable mention in the Toshiba ExploraVision competition for a Mars Colonization Vehicle concept, which would use an asteroid in a controlled bi-elliptic orbit as a transport vehicle to do the “heavy lifting” of supplies and personnel between Earth and Mars. They were invited to give a more detailed talk on the project in the Independent Study track of that conference; the post adds that the speakers at the conference were a great spur to their scientific enthusiasm.⁠[3]

The June 2010 post states that William L. Jolitz’s three grandchildren were all then working at NASA: Rebecca Jolitz in astrobiology, Ben Jolitz on orbital dynamics and space fatigue simulations, and Sarah Jolitz on spacecraft logistics for science projects.⁠[3]

The title page of her doctoral thesis records a B.A. from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry in 2014.⁠[2]

In the acknowledgements she writes that a chance meeting with Donna Sakima led to her introduction to Rob Lillis; she thanks Rob Lillis for taking the risk of hiring a “fresh-out-of-community-college undergraduate” to make a proton version of his electron-based thesis code, adding: “it took a decade, but here we are!”⁠[2]

The curriculum vitae of Robert J. Lillis lists her among the UC Berkeley undergraduates whose senior theses he advised, with the topic “High-energy ion transport through planetary atmospheres.”⁠[4]

On June 5, 2014, the Thiel Foundation announced the new class of its 20 Under 20 Fellowship, and she was selected for the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry. The class named 20 teenagers, each of whom received $100,000 over two years to launch a business and had to leave college; they were expected to be largely self-guided, with mentoring from former fellows and other entrepreneurs and investors, and were encouraged but not required to move to the San Francisco area. The list published by Entrepreneur gives her as item 9: 19 years old, from Los Gatos, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, already holding degrees in both physics and mathematics from UC Berkeley, and wanting to change the development cycle of satellites.⁠[5]

The list published by Inc42 on June 9, 2014 says that she “hopes to revolutionize the satellite development cycle” and describes her as a “researcher-entrepreneur with a family background in aerospace.”⁠[6]

A first-person article published by NCWIT Aspirations in Computing, whose author describes herself as a 2014 Thiel Fellow who co-founded CortexML with Eugene Wang, calls Rebecca Jolitz “a perfect instance of a scientist turned activist and entrepreneur because of her vocal passion around new space technology.”⁠[7]

In May 2017 she published, as first author, the paper “A Monte Carlo model of crustal field influences on solar energetic particle precipitation into the Martian atmosphere” in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, volume 122 (pages 5653–5669), with co-authors including C. F. Dong, C. O. Lee, R. J. Lillis, D. A. Brain and S. M. Curry.⁠[4]

The title page of her doctoral thesis records an M.A. from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2018.⁠[2]

In August 2021 she published, as first author, the paper “Test particle model predictions of SEP electron transport and precipitation at Mars” in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, volume 126, with co-authors including C. F. Dong, A. Rahmati, D. A. Brain, C. O. Lee and R. J. Lillis.⁠[4]

She completed her doctoral thesis, “Solar Energetic Particles at Mars,” in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder; its title page names the degree as Doctor of Philosophy and is dated 2022, and the university’s thesis repository records the degree level as doctoral with an issue date of January 5, 2022.⁠[2][1]

The abstract page of the thesis reads “Thesis directed by Prof. David Brain”; the repository record lists Daniel Baker in its advisor field and Robert Ergun, David Brain, Patricia Rankin and Mihaly Horanyi as committee members.⁠[2][1]

The thesis studies solar energetic particles (SEPs) at Mars, which its abstract describes as both a hazard to human spaceflight and a source of energy to planetary atmospheres. Its first part presents ASPEN (Atmospheric Scattering of Protons, Electrons, and Neutrals), a three-dimensional Monte Carlo simulation of particle transport and energy loss, and uses it to show that the Martian crustal magnetic fields weakened the low-energy part of the spectrum measured during the 2003 “Halloween” SEP event.⁠[1][2]

The second part uses the model to follow electrons of 10–200 keV from the solar wind to the atmosphere, finding that they mostly precipitate into magnetic cusps while some energetic electrons can reach closed-field regions. The third part uses MAVEN data from the declining phase of the solar cycle to compare the energy inputs of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation, the solar wind and SEPs: EUV was usually the largest, followed by the solar wind and then SEPs, while SEP ions sometimes reached levels comparable to solar wind electrons and may increase ionization on the nightside.⁠[1]

The thesis notes that its second chapter is based on sections of her two papers published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics in 2017 and 2021, which were combined and updated.⁠[2]

In the acknowledgements she thanks her committee and thanks David Brain for his continued guidance and patience, especially in difficult circumstances, and recalls the David Brain group’s many thoughtful discussions and “occasional bout of paper-airplane-throwing insanity”; she thanks Andrea Hughes for the opportunity to put the simulation developed in the thesis to use in modeling proton aurora, and names the collaborators at SSL with whom she had “many fruitful and fun discussions” when she visited for the summer: Christina Lee, Shannon Curry, Ali Rahmati, Shaosui Xu and Gwen Hanley.⁠[2]

The acknowledgements call Autumn “the best sister I could ask for”: Autumn helped her learn Python many years earlier so that she did not have to get stuck with IDL, and spontaneously converted her single-thread simulation into a parallel one. At the end of the acknowledgements she thanks Nitin “for being with me on the road to thesis Kal’Hyah” and writes: “I’m incredibly fortunate to have you in my life.”⁠[2]

In February 2023 she published, as first author, the paper “Energy input of EUV, solar wind, and SEPs at Mars: MAVEN observations during solar minimum” in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, volume 128, with co-authors including A. Rahmati, D. A. Brain, C. O. Lee, R. J. Lillis and E. Thiemann.⁠[4]

The preprint “Characterizing Precipitation Behaviors of H− in the Martian Atmosphere,” submitted on January 11, 2024 and posted on ESS Open Archive on February 2, lists her as third author with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) as her affiliation; its first author is Sarah A. Henderson of Montana State University. The study found measurable H− precipitation in only 1.8% of observations, mainly under high-energy solar wind conditions near perihelion. It also compared H− fluxes with those of H+, finding H− fluxes about 4.5 times lower than H+, and found that 0.29–0.78% of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) are converted to H− at solar wind energies of 1–3 keV.⁠[8]

A Live Science article of May 1, 2024 on global auroras at Mars identifies her as a member of MAVEN’s Solar Energetic Particle instrument team at the University of California, Berkeley, and quotes a remark she made to Spaceweather.com: “Mars is currently getting hit by roughly one to two CMEs every month, bringing a hefty supply of SEPs.” The article states that she added that solar storms do not have to hit the planet head-on to trigger auroras.⁠[9]

At the Europlanet Science Congress 2024, held at Freie Universität Berlin from September 8 to 13, 2024, she was one of the authors of the abstract “Mars Aurora on the Rise to Solar Max,” with SSL/Berkeley as her affiliation; the first author was Nick Schneider of LASP. The abstract states that since August 2022 MAVEN’s IUVS instrument had observed eight major auroral events, half of them since February 2024, and that all auroral events were closely correlated with the arrival of SEPs as measured by MAVEN’s SEP instrument.⁠[10]

On May 30, 2025, Science Advances (volume 11, issue 22) published the paper “First direct observations of atmospheric sputtering at Mars,” of whose 11 authors she is the fifth; the first author is Shannon M. Curry. Using more than nine years of MAVEN data, the paper describes the first direct observations of sputtering in the upper atmosphere of Mars; its abstract calls sputtering an atmospheric escape process that may have been dominant during earlier epochs of the Sun. Correlating argon densities with solar electric fields, the authors found sputtered rates of argon more than four times higher than model predictions and presented evidence of enhanced sputtering during a solar storm.⁠[11]

Her page in the Space Sciences Laboratory directory lists three recent publications from 2025: in addition to that paper, “Penetrating Solar Wind Protons as a Source of Hydrogen to the Martian Atmosphere” and “Detection of visible-wavelength aurora on Mars.”⁠[12]

As of November 2026, the directory of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley lists her as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Her biography there states that she is a member of the MAVEN spacecraft science team and studies space weather at Mars, from recent extreme events to its historical influence on the development of the Martian atmosphere.⁠[12]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics: Official website: https://lasp.colorado.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

Space Sciences Laboratory: Official website: https://www.ssl.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]