Michael Kempf is a member of the technical staff in the Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, Calif. JPL is a federally funded research and development center that manages robotic missions for NASA.

Before starting at JPL, he earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the dental school at UCLA. He first experienced life at JPL as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

At UWM, Michael was involved in developing a genetic system (plasmids and methods of gene transfer) to identify and analyze genes involved in bacterial gliding motility. At UCLA, Michael studied the pathogenesis mechanisms of an anaerobic bacterium involved in gum disease (periodontitis).

As a postdoc at Caltech, he was involved in identifying and analyzing hydrogen peroxide resistant bacterial isolates from the JPL spacecraft assembly facility. In addition, he participated on a research cruise to isolate and identify resistant bacterial isolates from hydrothermal vents on the floor of the Indian Ocean. Michael has published numerous journal articles and has given presentations on his research all over the world.

At JPL, Michael is the task manager for a research task and the planetary protection engineer for the Dawn flight project, which is scheduled for launch in 2007. As a task manager, his responsibilities include planning the budget and experiments for the research project, performing the experiments, analyzing the data, and reporting the results and recommendations to JPL and NASA.

As the planetary protection engineer for Dawn, a mission to study 2 asteroids, his responsibilities include planning, implementing, monitoring and reporting the approaches that the flight project takes to meet its planetary protection requirements before launch. In addition to Dawn, Michael has been involved with other flight projects, including the Mars Exploration Rovers, which launched in 2003 and, in 2006, are still roving over the surface of Mars!