NASA Postdoctoral Program Opportunities

• U.S. Citizens Accepted
• Lawful Permanent Residents Accepted
• Foreign Nationals Accepted - Applications with citizens from Designated Countries will not be accepted at this time, unless they are Legal Permanent Residents of the United States. A complete list of Designated Countries can be found at: https://www.nasa.gov/oiir/export-control.

Energy is required for living systems to emerge, proliferate, evolve, and maintain themselves.  Our work focuses on quantifying energy availability in the environment by the dual metrics of Gibbs energy change and power (energy flux), and understanding how this influences the distribution and activity of life.  We pursue this question through a combination of field and experimental observations (aqueous chemical and metabolic process rate measurements) with cell-scale reaction transport modeling designed to constrain metabolic energy balance at the single cell level.  Our work particularly emphasizes microbial metabolism and ecology in low-energy (often subsurface) environments, with serpentinizing systems as the main focus of current research.  We seek a quantitative and mechanistic understanding of the interplay between energy and life in such systems to serve as the basis for assessing the biological potential of environments beyond Earth, and for informing strategies to seek evidence of life in those environments.