Carnegie Fellow Fred Ciesla joined DTM in January. He earned his Ph.D. in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona in 2003, and he spent 2004-2005 as a National Research Council Associate at the NASA Ames Research Center. Ciesla’s research is on using the physical and chemical evolution of the solar nebula and disks around young stars. He is currently looking at how the radial transport of material in a protoplanetary disk leads to fluctuations in chemical abundances at different disk locations. At DTM, Ciesla plans to extend his research to examine vertical transport, and he also plans to apply his models to an understanding of the properties of comets and planets around other stars.