Kevin Hand is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at JPL.
He is also the founder of Cosmos Education

Cosmos Education

Cosmos Education is an NGO devoted to science and technology education in the developing world, with a strong concentration on Africa.It has also extended its efforts to Asia....

 and was its president until 2007.
He was working at NASA Ames when he was inspired to form Cosmos Education in 1999 after getting a grant from the Earth and Space Foundation to tour African schools to talk about how education relates to space research.

Hand studied psychology and physics as an undergraduate at Dartmouth.
He earned a master's degree at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in mechanical engineering while also working as a public policy research associate at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
He chose the question of whether Europa

Europa (moon)

Europa Slightly smaller than Earth's Moon, Europa is primarily made of silicate rock and probably has an iron core. It has a tenuous atmosphere composed primarily of oxygen. Its surface is composed of ice and is one of the smoothest in the Solar System. This surface is striated by cracks and...

's putative ocean could harbor life as his Geological & Environmental Sciences PhD dissertation topic, under the direction of Christopher Chyba

Christopher Chyba

Christopher F. Chyba is an American astrobiologist, and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University....

,
earning the doctorate in 2007.

While a PhD student, he was chosen by James Cameron

James Cameron

James Francis Cameron is a Canadian-American film director, film producer, screenwriter, editor, environmentalist and inventor...

 to take marine biology

Marine biology

Marine biology is the scientific study of organisms in the ocean or other marine or brackish bodies of water. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather...

 samples from hydrothermal vents in subsea expeditions to the mid-Atlantic ridge

Mid-Atlantic Ridge

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a mid-ocean ridge, a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, and part of the longest mountain range in the world. It separates the Eurasian Plate and North American Plate in the North Atlantic, and the African Plate from the South...

 and East Pacific Rise

East Pacific Rise

The East Pacific Rise is a mid-oceanic ridge, a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It separates the Pacific Plate to the west from the North American Plate, the Rivera Plate, the Cocos Plate, the Nazca Plate, and the Antarctic Plate...

. He was a featured scientist in Cameron's 2005 IMAX

IMAX

IMAX is a motion picture film format and a set of proprietary cinema projection standards created by the Canadian company IMAX Corporation. IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems...

 documentary, Aliens of the Deep

Aliens of the Deep

Aliens of the Deep is a 2005 documentary film, directed in part by James Cameron alongside fellow cameraman Steven Quale, who would later go on to direct Final Destination 5 six years later, and filmed in the IMAX 3D format. It was produced by Walden Media and Walt Disney Pictures...

.

Selected publications

, a review of