NASA Postdoctoral Program - Understanding the Formation of Kerogen in Chaotropic & Kosmotropic Environments

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 project investigates early diagenetic processes in terrestrial ecosystems to understand geochemical drivers of kerogen formation and degradation. The research will use laboratory experiments to examine how salt content, concentration, and wet/dry cycling affect biogenic organic incorporation into insoluble macromolecular structures, with primary relevance to ancient and modern Mars and other salt-rich organic-containing targets like Enceladus and Europa. The project aims to understand the role of water availability in driving the formation of recalcitrant molecular biosignatures, namely kerogen, across various salt compositions. Understanding the drivers of initial kerogen formation in salt-rich settings is crucial for predicting the state of organic matter on Mars and determining the types of instrumentation required to analyze organics and seek molecular biosignatures.