About Me

I'm Szilárd Gyalay, a planetary scientist at the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. I earned my Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz in 2023 and use geophysics to unveil the secrets of planetary bodies such as searching for subsurface oceans in icy satellites of Saturn (see my recent papers on Tethys and Mimas) or a subsurface magma ocean within Jupiter's hypervolcanic satellite Io (see my recent paper here). I have also examined how Mars' crustal porosity may reveal its thermal history, especially how it may interact with the generation of porosity by impact cratering. In the past I have worked on quantifying the ice-content of Martian soil, re-calibrating the Moon's thermometer, and the variability of the Jovian magnetosphere.

Learn more about my current and past research from links to papers, posters, and abstracts.

Enjoy also videos on my work, where an animated cartoon version of me gave my talks at virtual science conferences early on in the pandemic: searching for Io's magma ocean and the origin of 10-km-scale layers in the Martian crust. I also gave a short interview on my 2020 Mars paper as part of a WeMartians podcast episode.