Nathan Kurtz received the B.S. degree in Physics from Iowa State University in 2004, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2007 and 2009, respectively. His thesis focused on the development of sea ice thickness retrievals from the ICESat mission and his postdoctoral work continued the development of satellite and airborne retrievals of sea ice properties and improving model parameterizations. He became a civil servant scientist in the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2013 with work focusing primarily on sea ice thickness and snow depth retrievals from laser and radar altimetry systems. He was the Project Scientist for NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne project from 2015-2018, leading numerous field campaigns to the Arctic and Antarctic and the production of sea ice thickness and snow depth observations from the campaign. He became the ICESat-2 Deputy Project Scientist in 2018 and is presently the lead for the mission sea ice surface height and freeboard products. Lastly, in 2021 he began serving as Chief for the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory.