Meenakshi Wadhwa is a planetary scientist and educator who studies the formation and evolution of the Solar System through the analysis of planetary materials including meteorites, Moon rocks and other extraterrestrial samples returned by spacecraft missions.

[1] Meenakshi Wadhwa received her Ph.D. in earth and planetary sciences in 1994 from Washington University in St. Louis.

She was a postdoctoral research geochemist at University of California, San Diego (1994–95), and then became curator of meteorites at Field Museum of Natural History (1995–2006).

She was PI of a proposal for Sample Collection for the Investigation of Mars (SCIM) to the NASA Discovery program in 2010.

[5] She was awarded the Nier Prize in 2000,[6] a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005,[7] and the J. Lawrence Smith Medal by the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.