Manar Al Asad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Her research explores planetary cooling in its many forms, from the solidification of planetary cores and magnetic field generation, to mantle convection, plate tectonics, and convection within icy satellites, and how these interior processes govern a planet's surface environment and long-term habitability. Her work has traced how Earth's tectonic style has evolved over deep time, offering new insight into the persistence of its magnetic field and a framework for interpreting the geologic record. More broadly, she is interested in how the evolution of planetary interiors, their cores and mantles, is expressed in observable features across the solar system, from magnetic fields and surface topography to the geologic and climate record.

Al Asad earned her Ph.D. in Geophysics from Brown University and previously served as the Reginald A. Daly Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. She was Deputy Instrument Scientist on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu and contributed to the MESSENGER mission to Mercury.