Fellowships let West Windsor native pursue his passion for the red planet
By: Molly Petrilla
WEST WINDSOR If there really is life on Mars, James Wray wants to help find it.
The West Windsor native recently began his first year as a doctoral student at Cornell University with the help of two prestigious fellowships one from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation and another from the National Science Foundation. Both fellowships are considered highly selective; the NSF chooses 1,000 students annually for its three-year fellowship, while the Hertz Foundation awards just 15 full graduate five-year fellowships each year.
With the fellowship funding he received, Mr. Wray, who will turn 23 in January, says he was able to put aside financial considerations when selecting a graduate school and chose to study under Steve Squyres, the principal investigator in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.
Mars, he says, is of particular interest because it may hold life or at least have the potential for life. For his doctoral thesis, Mr. Wray says he tentatively plans to study the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter a new NASA mission that started sending back high-resolution images earlier this month.
Though he says his interest in other planets developed at an early age, as a senior at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South, Mr. Wray applied to colleges with a plan to study aerospace engineering and spend his days building spaceships to send other people to the moon.
But a family trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina the summer before his freshman year at Princeton University caused him to re-evaluate his original plan.
"The sky there is so much clearer because you don’t have light pollution," he said. "It felt like I was looking at a different sky."
He settled into a nocturnal routine, sleeping for most of the day and staying up all night to admire the stars through a small pair of binoculars.
While some travelers might have preferred soaking up sun on the beach, Mr. Wray was in his element after the sun went down. He says the summer vacation was so enjoyable he decided to give astrophysics a try.
Though he had always enjoyed sciences including biology, chemistry and geology he was quickly drawn to the universe’s "fantastic, awesome size and power" once he began to study astronomy at Princeton.
"I hadn’t realized how big and far apart things are in the universe," he said. "It just impressed me so much how hard it is to conceive of these sizes and scales, but how cool it is that we can actually understand them if we study physics hard and long enough."
During his time at Princeton he graduated summa cum laude in May with a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics Mr. Wray used telescopes in New Mexico to study the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, both of which have conditions that could potentially foster life.
When he finishes his studies at Cornell, Mr. Wray says he plans to pursue a research career in planetary science, continuing to focus on the search for life or habitable environments.
"Ultimately," he adds, "I’d like to be at a university and be able to teach as well as do research."
But that’s not to say he’ll only be working from his home planet.
"I’ve always loved traveling," he says, "and actually getting to do science on the moon or on Mars is something that certainly appeals to me."
For now, he’s aiming slightly lower into the vast universe, working toward a pilot’s license for small private aircraft. But, he says, "if NASA is looking for scientists to send to Mars, then I will gladly sign up."

