As part of the annual Astrobiology workshop at the University of Washington, my fellow grad students and I journeyed to Friday Harbor Labs to board the Rachel Carson, a UW oceanographic research vessel in fall 2019. While on-board, we supervised as the crew trawled the Puget Sound for various invertebrates. We then dissected our invertebrates in the laboratory to discuss the growing complexity demonstratedby lifeforms like bivalves, prawns, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins.

Under the supervision of Dr. Niki Parenteau (NASA Ames) and with federal permits, I used a mobile spectrometer to measure the reflectivity of different microbial mats in the acidic environments of the Yellowstone hot springs in summer 2019. Dr. Parenteau specializes in studying the unique spectral fingerprints of these extremo-tolerant organisms, which we believe may have carpeted the early Archean Earth in a near-global layer. This will work will illuminate how we might remotely detect similar lifeforms on planets outside our solar system.

We need a hierarchy of models to predict and characterize terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres, as 1D and 3D models have different …

Using Brian Keating’s 2018 book Losing the Nobel Prize as a primary text, I analyzed the infamous story of the BICEP science team in their search for proof of the universe’s anistropy. While the scientific community deemed their efforts a great failure, I found an important human story underlying the team’s trials: we do our best work when we truly work together towards a common goal. Conversely, when we operate in an environment built on the fear of failure and its consequences, we suffer academically and more importantly, we suffer personally.