A new NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) opportunity was posted today for our Oceans Across Space and Time (OAST) initiative. What’s OAST? I can’t tell you yet, because the relevant press releases have been stuck in purgatory for several weeks. Hopefully I can write that post next week. Nonetheless you can figure out what we’re all about based on the NPP opportunity here, and pasted below. If you’re interested act fast, NPP proposals are due November 1!
Past and present oceans are widely distributed in our solar system and are among the best environments to search for extant life. New tools, techniques, and strategies are required to support future life detection missions to ocean worlds. Oceans Across Space and Time (OAST) is a new project under the Network for Life Detection (NfoLD) research coordination network. OAST seeks to understand the distribution, diversity, and limits of life on contemporary, remnant, and relict ocean worlds to facilitate the search for extant life. Central to this effort is the development of an Ocean Habitability Index that characterizes life in the context of the physicochemical stressors and metabolic opportunities of an ocean environment. OAST will be developing the OHI based on field efforts in surficial hypersaline environments and deep hypersaline anoxic basins, and from laboratory-based experimental studies.
Postdoctoral fellows are sought to support OAST activities across three themes: characterizing ocean habitability, detecting and measuring biological activity, and understanding diversity and the limits of evolution. Postdoctoral fellows are expected to interact across two or more institutions within OAST. Participating institutions are Georgia Institute of Technology (Schmidt, Glass, Ingall, Reinhardt, Stewart, Stockton), Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego (Bowman, Bartlett), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Pontrefact and Carr), Louisiana State University (Doran), University of Kansas (Olcott), Stanford University (Dekas), Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (Som), and the University of Texas at Austin (Soderlund). Candidates should contact the PI (Schmidt) and two potential mentors early in the proposal process to scope possible projects in line with the main directions of OAST and NFoLD.
