Institute for Planets and Life

Areas of Research

• Formation and early evolution of planetary systems, including star formation, the properties and astrophysics of protoplanetary disks, debris disks and planetesimal collisions.
• Exoplanets and their atmospheres: programs to search for and characterize exoplanets with different techniques, including planetary transit and eclipse observations, radial velocity and interferometric planet searches, high-contrast imaging.

• Planetary atmospheres, including that of Titan, as an analog for the atmosphere of early earth prebiotic conditions, and possible life.
• Mineral surfaces and the origin of life, studies into the the roles of mineral surfaces in prebiotic molecular stabilization, molecular degradation, and polymerization reactions.
• Isotopic records of life through Earth history, including that of the earliest life on earth.

• Extremophile research, such as adaptive mechanisms of extremophilic archaea to their environment, stress responses to environmental changes, and DNA repair mechanisms
• Environmental microbiology, including metagenomics of Mars analog environments such as the Atacama Desert and the Dry Valleys of Antarctica