Erik Asphaug was born in 1961 in Oslo. He grew up in various parts of the US and Norway. He majored in English and Math at Rice University, and then taught high school in Minneapolis and Tucson. He started graduate studies at LPL in 1988 and has been a planetary scientist ever since. In 1998 he was awarded the Urey Prize of the AAS/DPS, and asteroid 7939 Asphaug is named for his research on comet geophysics and planetary impacts. His first faculty appointment was in Earth Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, where he helped create the Planetary Sciences program and became Full Professor in 2006. In 2012 he became Ronald Greeley Chair of Planetary Science at Arizona State University. In 2017 he returned to Tucson and joined the faculty of LPL.