Grant Heiken

Grant H. Heiken was born on 11 October 1942. His birthplace has not been made public. He grew up in the Central Valley of California in the late 1950s and liked to compare his high school years to the world of George Lucas's American Graffiti, since the two grew up in the same area at the same time.

He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley (1964 per IAVCEI), a master's degree at the University of Texas at Austin (1966) and a PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sources differ on the PhD year: the IAVCEI obituary gives 1969 and the Quimper Geological Society biography gives 1972. He was Richard V. Fisher's first doctoral student, and his dissertation mapped the Fort Rock and Christmas Lake maar volcanoes and tuff rings of southern Oregon.

Heiken joined NASA in the spring of 1969 at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, just before Apollo 11. Over roughly six years he worked on every post-mission Preliminary Examination Team, specialising in the lunar regolith. He was one of the first geologists to recognise and name agglutinates and helped show how they can be used to judge the maturity of a lunar soil. He co-authored the 1970 Science paper on the Apollo 11 drive-tube core samples and taught geology to astronauts. He described working long days in sealed laboratory clothing he jokingly called "pajamas".

In 1974 or 1975 (sources differ) Heiken left NASA to help Tom McGetchin build a new geology group at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, now Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he stayed until retiring in 2003. His work covered geothermal exploration and development, volcanic hazard analysis, explosive volcanism, uses of volcanic rocks, continental scientific drilling and integrated urban science. He studied large eruptions in the Jemez Mountains and around the world, including Santorini, Vesuvius and Iceland, and in his later career turned to how cities live with geologic hazards. He was also among the first to study volcanic ash with a scanning electron microscope.

Heiken served as president of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI) from 1995 to 1999. His research and exploration took him to the United States (Oregon, California, New Mexico, Colorado and Hawaii), Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Italy, Greece, Iceland, Ethiopia and, through Apollo samples, the Moon.

Heiken wrote or co-wrote 11 books and more than 100 scientific publications. Highlights include Atlas of Volcanic Ash (Smithsonian, 1974); Lunar Sourcebook: A User's Guide to the Moon, edited with David Vaniman and Bevan French (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change with Richard V. Fisher and Jeffrey Hulen (Princeton, 1997); The Seven Hills of Rome: A Geological Tour of the Eternal City with Renato Funiciello and Donatella De Rita (Princeton, 2005); On the Moon: The Apollo Journals with Eric Jones (Springer-Praxis, 2007); and Dangerous Neighbors: Volcanoes and Cities (Cambridge, 2013). In 2019 The Space Review put the Lunar Sourcebook first in a list of fifty Moon books, calling it the de facto base scientific reference work on the Moon.

The Italian edition of The Seven Hills of Rome won the 2007 Premio dei Lettori di Biblioteche di Roma. Colleagues credit him with naming lunar agglutinates and with pioneering electron microscope study of volcanic ash. No other individual honours have been confirmed in the sources used for this profile.

Heiken was married to Jody Heiken, a scientific editor, for more than 60 years. She copy edited On the Moon: The Apollo Journals. Together they were keen cooks; Dean Eppler called him a "card carrying" epicure. He read widely in history, culture, literature and languages and loved music, particularly opera. Information about children or other relatives has not been made public. The couple moved to Freeland, on Whidbey Island in Washington, in 2004, where he served on the board of the Whidbey Camano Land Trust, worked on Island County water resource questions and volunteered with local groups.

In 2017 Grant and Jody Heiken established the Grant and Jody Heiken Research Grant in Volcanology through the Geological Society of America Foundation, which supports graduate student research. The Lunar Sourcebook remains a standard reference for lunar science and exploration more than three decades after it appeared. In 2019 he gave the opening lecture of the Lunar and Planetary Institute's Cosmic Explorations series, Lunar Dirt, Rocks, and Legacy, about the Lunar Receiving Laboratory's first five years.

Grant Heiken died on Sunday 11 October 2026, his 84th birthday, on Whidbey Island, Washington, after a long battle with mesothelioma, according to the obituary by Dean Eppler in IAVCEI News. IAVCEI announced his death on 18 October 2026. Funeral or memorial arrangements have not been made public.

Recorded talks include Bronze Age Volcanic Eruption of Thira at the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study (26 October 2006) and Lunar Dirt, Rocks, and Legacy: The Lunar Receiving Laboratory's First Five Years at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (3 October 2019). In April 2014 he spoke to the Quimper Geological Society on Rome's geology, drawing on The Seven Hills of Rome. In November 2019 the South Whidbey Record profiled his Apollo years. Searches of X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok found no personal accounts.