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Dr. Ronald Ballouz specializes in granular physics, asteroids, and planetary defense. He works on the dynamical and mechanical surface processes of airless regolith-covered planetary bodies. His expertise includes developing cratering scaling relationships, conducting geophysical modeling, and developing highly optimized parallelized code to simulate particle collisional dynamics and the interaction of spacecraft with regolith. He has collaborated on space missions to explore small solar system bodies, such as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and the extended mission OSIRIS-APEX, JAXA’s Hayabusa 2, and JAXA/ESA’s future Phobos sample-return mission MMX. As a postdoc, he discovered and reported on the craters on Bennu’s boulders, which provided a means to evaluate the boulders’ strength, the recent dynamical history of Bennu, and properties of the near-Earth meteoroid complex. Dr. Ballouz also co-led the reconstruction of the OSIRIS-REx sampling of Bennu, using numerical simulations of the sampling mechanism (TAGSAM) to determine the geotechnical properties of Bennu’s regolith.