NASA Postdoctoral Program - Agnostic Biosignatures and Planetary Mass Spectrometry

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific research opportunity focuses on expanding our understanding of how the chemical complexity of a molecule identified in a planetary ocean worlds environment may be an indicator of the presence of biology. The research will compare the structure of organic compounds produced abiotically (such as those extracted from meteorite samples) with complex organic compounds produced by living systems, utilizing tandem mass spectrometer techniques in association with a variety of separation and ionization techniques to explore the hypothesis that there is a certain level of complexity beyond which abiotic production is unlikely. This work will be conducted at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in close coordination with Dr. Sarah Johnson's team exploring agnostic approaches to life detection and a research team at the University of Glasgow led by Leroy Cronin that utilizes graph theory to explore molecular complexity.