Welcome to Astrobiology at the University of Washington
UWAB Headlines
11/14/2018
Searching for Life in the Great Beyond
The College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington covered a story on Searching for Life in the Great Beyond . In the interview, Professor Victoria Meadows highlights how team members are working towards answering the question of: Are We Alone? "At VPL we use simulators with different capabilities to figure out what instrument would work best to make the sort of observations we want to make. We share this information with NASA, because NASA wants to know how it can use its assets to best search for life in the Universe.” The Virtual Planetary Laboratory is so instrumental in identifying the needs of future space technology that NASA recently awarded it a grant totaling $11 million over the next five years. MORE>11/09/2018
UWAB faculty are accepting new students this year
For prospective graduate students considering applying to UW: the Astrobiology program is accepting applicants for the Dual-Title Ph.D. program! The deadline is January 15, 2019. See the Admissions page for faculty accepting new students. MORE>11/01/2018
Modeled Climates and Spectra for Possible Evolved Climates for the Seven-Planet TRAPPIST-1 System
The TRAPPIST-1 system hosts seven terrestrial-sized planets, in and around the habitable zone of their small M dwarf host star. Since M dwarf stars exhibit a long superluminous pre-main-sequence phase during which its planets likely experience extreme volatile loss, the TRAPPIST-1 planets may have highly evolved, possibly uninhabitable atmospheres. Resultant possible atmospheres may be post runaway atmospheres like Venus, dominated by CO2, or be dominated by O2 as a result of severe water loss. These atmospheres exhibit spectroscopic signals in transit that may be observable by the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. For more, read this new paper led by Andrew Lincowski, Ph.D. Candidate in Astronomy and Astrobiology. MORE>10/17/2018
NASA Astronaut Dr. Kate Rubins visits the Genome Sciences Department
Graduate students and postdocs from the Astrobiology Program and Genome Sciences Department met with NASA astronaut Dr. Kate Rubins to discuss how scientific experiments are performed aboard the ISS. A summary of Dr. Rubins's visit was published by the UW student newspaper, The Daily. MORE>08/28/2018
Profs. Toner and Catling awarded the NASA Habitable Worlds Grant
Profs. Jonathan(PI) and David Catling (Co-I) were awarded a new 3-year NASA Habitable Worlds grant for a project with the title, "The Composition and Habitability of Enceladus’ Ocean”. The project uses experiments and theoretical modeling to understand the chemistry of Enceladus' ocean based on spacecraft measurements of erupting plumes. MORE>07/10/2018
"Ghost Dunes" on Mars
Work by UW NASA astrobiology postdoc, Kenzie Day (who has just started as an Assistant Professor at UCLA), and her advisor, David Catling, was featured in a blog at the American Geophysical Union MORE>06/25/2018
Will We Know Life When We See It?
UW researchers in the Virtual Planetary Laboratory led and were co-authors on a series of papers published in the journal Astrobiology outlining the history — and suggesting the future — of the search for life on exoplanets. In this set of papers, researchers investigated the most promising signs of life (biosignatures), and considered how to interpret these signs if we were to detect them on an exoplanet. “For life to be detectable on a distant world it needs to strongly modify its planet in a way that we can detect,” said UW astronomy professor Victoria Meadows. The NASA press release can be found here. MORE>06/18/2018
Astrobiology Top 10: How Phosphorus helped oxygenate Earth's Atmosphere
A paper by Astrobiology student Mike Kipp (ESS) and AB Alumna Eva Stueeken (2014), now at University of St Andrews in Scotland, has been recognized as one of the Top 10 astrobiology discoveries of the year by Astrobiology magazine! The paper can be found here MORE>05/21/2018
Marshall Styczinski awarded NASA Earth & Space Science Fellowship
Astrobiology Graduate Certificate and Physics Ph.D student Marshall Styczinski, was just awarded a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF)! Marshall's project is focused on applying multifluid plasma models to Europa. The end goal is a better understanding of how Europa's oceans are distributed, by comparing simulated spacecraft data to measurements by the Galileo mission. MORE>05/15/2018
Josh Krissansen-Totton receives Graduate Dean's Medalist Award
Astrobiology/ESS student Josh Krissansen-Totton was awarded the annual UW College of the Environment “Graduate Dean’s Medalist Award” for outstanding academic achievement as a graduate student! Josh has published eight papers as a graduate student, and on six of those he was the first author. Congratulations Josh! MORE>05/04/2018