Professor Steve Greenbaum received a $5M, 5-year grant from NASA in October 2024 to work with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a new generation of electric power sources (batteries and supercapacitors) for planetary exploration spacecraft and landers. He leads a team of four faculty and several graduate students in this project, which also has a significant education component including course development and undergraduate summer internships at NASA centers.

Greenbaum is CUNY Distinguished Professor of Physics at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He served (2008-14) as executive officer of the Ph.D. program in physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and numerous times (total of nine years) as the Physics Department chair at Hunter. Professor Greenbaum earned his Ph.D. in physics from Brown University. He was an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., a Fulbright Scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a NASA/NRC Senior Research Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Lab, where he was a member of the team that designed the lithium ion batteries for the successful Mars Rover missions. He has held visiting professor positions at many universities and was selected as one of eleven Jefferson Science Fellows in the U.S. State Department in 2014-15. His main research interest is magnetic resonance studies of materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion. He has co-authored over 330 peer-reviewed publications, and directly supervised 30 Ph.D. students, 23 postdocs, plus numerous undergraduate researchers. His mentoring received national recognition through the White House OSTP (PAESMEM Award, 2002).