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About

Enrica Quartini is a pioneering polar roboticist and ocean engineer whose work bridges the gap between Earth’s most extreme environments and the exploration of icy ocean worlds beyond. Her primary research focuses on developing robust underwater robotic platforms and instrumentation for sub-ice and deep-sea environments, with a particular emphasis on the grounding zones of Antarctic glaciers. Quartini’s major contributions include the design of a compact, high-pressure water sampler for the underwater robot Icefin, enabling discrete sample collection in the harsh conditions of Thwaites Glacier—a critical region for sea-level rise projections. She also played a key role in Icefin’s historic first long-range robotic exploration of the Thwaites Glacier grounding zone in January 2020, part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration’s MELT project. This mission provided unprecedented in situ observations of ice-ocean interactions. Her work on Antarctic analogs for Europa highlights the astrobiological significance of her research. Though early in her career, Quartini’s innovations have already garnered citations and set the stage for transformative advances in polar and planetary exploration.