Monica Grady

Selfie (May 2016)

Monica Mary Grady, CBE (born 15 July 1958 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK), is a leading British space scientist, primarily known for her work on meteorites. She is currently Professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University

Grady is a practising Catholic, the oldest of eight children. Her youngest sister, Dr Ruth Grady, is a Senior Lecturer in microbiology at the University of Manchester. Grady's husband, Professor Ian Wright, is also a planetary scientist at the Open University. Ian is Principal Investigator of the Ptolemy instrument on the Philae lander, part of ESA's Rosetta spacecraft. Ian and Monica have one son, Jack Wright, who works in the film industry.

Grady graduated from the University of Durham in 1979, where she was a student at St Aidan's College then went on to complete a PhD on carbon in stony meteorites at Darwin College, Cambridge in 1982. She studied under Professor Colin Pillinger. Grady was formerly based at the Natural History Museum, where she curated the UK's national collection of meteorites. She has built up an international reputation in meteoritics, publishing many papers on the carbon and nitrogen isotope geochemistry of primitive meteorites, on Martian meteorites, and on interstellar components of meteorites.

Grady was appointed a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society in 2000, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2012 and a Fellow of the Geochemical Society in 2015 (these are honorary appointments, bestowed by the President and Council of each Society, following nomination by peer-scientists). She has been a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society since 1990, and a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland since 1992. From 2012-2013, she was President of the Meteoritical Society. She was awarded the Coke Meda l of the Geological Society of London in 2016, for her work in science communication.