NASA Postdoctoral Program - ICAR - Center for the integrated Origins of Life (iCOOL)

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented U.S. and non-U.S. 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 opportunity focuses on research at the Center for the integrated Origins of Life (iCOOL), investigating poorly understood processes on the ancient Earth that caused increases in the complexity of organic molecules, creating RNA, DNA, protein, and polysaccharide. The research involves developing alternative models of the origins of life in which extant biochemistry is the product of prolonged and creative chemical evolution, requiring challenging integration of chemical sciences and evolutionary theory. The research explores whether molecules before life formed mutualisms and were recursively sculpted, selected and exapted via non-Darwinian co-evolutionary processes, with experimental approaches including wet-dry or freeze-thaw cycling studies.