Maria Gritsevich is a senior research scientist, docent in Planetary Sciences at the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki (UH) and at the Institute of Physics and Technology, Ural Federal University. She graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, where she obtained her M.Sc. degree with high honors in 2007. In the following two years she obtained her Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics(2009) from the Russian Academy of Sciences with a Ph.D. thesis completed jointly at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics and at the Institute of Mechanics of MSU. After completing her Ph.D. she has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Space Agency. Prior to coming to UH, she was appointed as a leading scientist at MSU and at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she developed novel idea to interpret meteor observations using the analytical solution of the equations of Meteor Physics (this by-passes established then brute force modeling approach requiring number of artificially set assumptions). She has also worked as a Specialist Research Scientist at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute.
Her primary scientific interests include meteors, fluid dynamics, remote sensing, light scattering experiments, and laboratory researches on extraterrestrial materials. She gained crucial research experience by joining the ERC Advanced project SAEMPL "Scattering and Absorption of Electromagnetic Waves in Particulate Media", national-scale projects, as well as international collaborative projects, such as FP7 RASTAS SPEAR "RAdiation-Shapes Thermal protection investigAtionS for high-SPeed EArth Re-entry", NEOShield, and EuroPlaNet.
Her work has been awarded with several prestigious recognitions, among them the International Academic Publishing Company "Nauka/Interperiodica" and the Pleiades Publishing Inc. best journal publication in Physics and Mathematics award (2009) and asteroid (14345) Gritsevich. In 2010 she was awarded the Gold Medal for young scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences, given to only one Russian scientist a year in each fundamental direction.
