Astrobiology Program Early Career Collaboration Award 2013 Selections

The NASA Astrobiology Program Early Career Collaboration Award offers research-related travel support for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Applicants are encouraged to use these resources to circulate among two or more research teams, however any travel that is critical for the applicant’s research will be considered.

The following early career scientists were selected for travel support from the April 2013 competition:

Zachary R. Adam, Montana State University, will travel to the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA to learn new tools to incorporate a newly discovered fossil assemblage from 1.5 billion-year-old rocks in Montana into a framework for the early evolution of eukaryotes on Earth.

Rebecca Mickol, University of Arkansas, will travel to the University of Florida Space Life Sciences Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center to conduct experiments with anaerobic methanogens in the Mars Simulation Chamber of Dr. Andrew Schuerger and also collaborate with Dr. Wayne Nicholson.

Harry Oduro, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will collaborate with James Farquhar, at the University of Maryland, College Park, on distinguishing the origin of sulfur isotope anomalies in Archean and meteoritic organic sulfonic acids.

Sarah Sonnett, University of Hawaii, will participate in an observing run on the 6.5-meter Magellan Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, to test models that look at volatiles and their distribution in the outer solar system.

For more information on this opportunity see http://astrobiology2.arc.nasa.gov/nai/funding/travel/intro/