By Sarah Treadwell On October 20, 2020, NASA reached a significant achievement with a spacecraft named OSIRIS-REx. This was a mission nearly 10 years in the works. OSIRIS-REx’s mission objective was to sample and return to Earth 60 g of small, dusty particles from an asteroid named Bennu, 200 million miles from Earth. Upon its successful return, this will deliver some of the first samples of fresh asteroid material brought back from our solar system. Other return sample missions have […]

By Kurt Ger Jacob Haqq-Misra is a research scientist at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. His areas of focus include planetary habitability, atmospheric dynamics, environmental ethics, extraterrestrial life, and space settlement (he has an upcoming book on the subject with the University Press of Kansas). He completed his Ph.D. in meteorology and astrobiology (2010) and his M.S. in meteorology (2007) from Penn State University. He also holds degrees in astrophysics and computer science from the University of Minnesota (2005). […]

By Elisabeth Lee One of the biggest worries an undergraduate student may have is whether or not they are pursuing the proper degree or chasing the perfect career. But as senior scientists and researchers shower their wisdom upon younger students, there is a common theme of uncertainty and an overall normalization to adjust what you pursue as you gain more experiences. Dr. Mrina Nikrad is a senior scientist at the pharmaceutical company Editas Medicine, and she takes part in developing […]

By Kurt Ger As I opened up Zoom to get to my interview with Dr. Berea, I felt nervous. The brief hour I’d spent looking her up beforehand to get an idea of what I could ask had returned entirely too many answers. A PhD in economics, another in computational social sciences, winning a Keck Futures Initiative grant as a postdoc, her research published in six places and supported by institutions across the United States, data scientist and AI mentor […]

By Elisabeth Lee How did life as we know it begin? What makes the cells in our bodies different from the cells in the wood in something like a desk? These are questions that excite scientists and non-scientists alike. For scientists like Dr. Natalie Grefenstette, these are the questions that drive her research and for others, such questions can be a conduit of interest into a field that may not be familiar to them.  As an undergraduate student myself, I […]