Dr. Christian Schrader is a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. His dissertation research was conducted with Dr. Alberto Patiño-Douce at the University of Georgia in Athens. It centered on alkaline igneous rocks of the Trans-Pecos Magmatic Province (TPMP), specifically the Oligocene silica-undersaturated intrusions in Big Bend National Park (BBNP). This work integrated field mapping, petrographic microscopy and EMP analysis, geochemical characterization and modeling of major and trace elements, and piston-cylinder melting experiments. His M.S. thesis advisor was Dr. Doug Crowe at the University of Georgia where he conducted 40Ar/39Ar geochronology in the laboratory of Dr. Paul Layer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. During his PhD, Dr. Schrader worked at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) investigating compositional variation in lunar regolith. He was a co-investigator (CI) on two proposals that have been granted access to lunar samples by the Curation and Analysis Planning Team for Extraterrestrial Materials. The first of these proposals is lead by the principal investigator (PI) Dr. Doug Rickman at MSFC and concerns the characterization of particle type and phase composition and how they covary with particle size distribution and particle shape in the lunar regolith. The second investigation is led by Dr. Doug Stoeser at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Denver, Colorado and is focused on trace mineral occurrence and composition in the regolith.  Additionally, he was involved in evaluating and selecting geologic and synthetic materials as potential components in lunar regolith simulants.