Daniel Nagasawa joined the SSB in 2019 and is a program officer and Study Director for the Committee on Planetary Protection. Before joining the SSB, he was a graduate research assistant specializing in stellar astrophysics, measuring the abundance of elements in the atmospheres of very old, metal-poor stars. Dr. Nagasawa began his research career as an undergraduate research assistant for the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. When he began graduate school, he transitioned to designing and evaluating astronomical instrumentation, specifically ground-based spectrographs. He went on to specialize in high-resolution stellar spectroscopy and applied these techniques on stars in ultra-faint dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way to study the chemical history of the Galaxy as part of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). He also developed skills in education and public outreach by teaching an observational astronomy course and writing for an outreach initiative for DES. Dr. Nagasawa earned his Ph.D. in astronomy and his M.S in physics at Texas A&M University; he earned his B.S. in physics with a concentration in astrophysics from Stanford University.