People: Astrobiology Graduate Students

Jess Garvin
Earth & Space Sciences

I think that it's extraordinary that "life" is. Even more so, I find it absolutely bewildering that "life" not only evolved an awareness of the very thing that it is, but also that it developed the capacity to contemplate the very fact that it is. I am awed by our existence (and my capacity to be awed by our existence!) and am trying to better understand how the simple organisms of early Earth paved the way for the complexity that we see today.

My research focuses on the beginning of the story—the earliest evolution of the metabolic pathways central to life processes. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the development of nitrogen cycle and the corresponding biogeochemical conditions. Since bioavailable nitrogen is required for the survival of all organisms, and the processes regulating the bioavailable nitrogen budget are highly dependent on environmental conditions, feedbacks between the evolution of the nitrogen cycle and changing environmental conditions are critical to understanding the evolution of life on Earth and, in essence, our past.