NASA Postdoctoral Program - Organic Capillary Electrophoresis Analysis System (OCEANS) Instrument Hardware Development and Validation

The NASA Postdoctoral Program offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific postdoctoral position focuses on microscale chemical analyzer instrument development in the Microdevices Laboratory at JPL. The research involves the development and validation of an automated capillary electrophoresis - mass spectrometry (CE-MS) instrument capable of analyzing astrobiologically relevant compounds including amino acids, carboxylic acids, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The research effort has a significant engineering component, involving system design and automation required for implementation of these analyses on future robotic spaceflight missions searching for signs of life on ocean worlds such as Europa or Enceladus. The postdoctoral fellow will develop automated methods and associated hardware for end-to-end analysis of water and/or ice samples, and scientifically validate the bioanalytical approach using ocean world analog samples collected from glaciers, sub-glacial lakes, or deep ocean currents.