LPI Welcomes New Staff Scientist Laura Rodriguez
February 8, 2023
LPI recently welcomed a new staff scientist, Dr. Laura Rodriguez. Dr. Rodriguez is an organic geochemist and data scientist with broad research interests in the origins of life, abiotic organic chemistry, and chemometrics. Her main research aims to elucidate how geochemical environments drive the chemical evolution of organic materials, especially genetic precursors (e.g., N-heterocycles). In particular, she is interested in investigating whether the origins of life events could take place in oceanic environments, such as those on icy ocean worlds.
Read LPI’s interview with Dr. Laura Rodriguez to learn more.
LPI: How did you become interested in planetary science?
LR: I grew up having an interest; my favorite show growing up was Sailor Moon, and I enjoyed any anime that involved fantastical adventures in space. I was also obsessed with the night sky and would be sure to wake my father in the middle of the night so we could watch meteor showers together. Funny enough, as a child, my dream was to become an astronaut or marine biologist, so now that I investigate strategies to search for life on ocean worlds, I feel I got to achieve both!
Laura in front of a model of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover taken when she first joined JPL as a postdoc in 2019. Never did she imagine that just a couple of years later, she would get to join the MSL team as a participating scientist. As part of her MSL team duties, she is being trained in the role of Science Payload Uplink Lead for the ChemCam LIBS instrument (what appears as the rover’s “eye”).
LPI: How did you become interested in planetary science?
LR: I grew up having an interest; my favorite show growing up was Sailor Moon, and I enjoyed any anime that involved fantastical adventures in space. I was also obsessed with the night sky and would be sure to wake my father in the middle of the night so we could watch meteor showers together. Funny enough, as a child, my dream was to become an astronaut or marine biologist, so now that I investigate strategies to search for life on ocean worlds, I feel I got to achieve both!
Laura hiking a glacier in Iceland as part of the NASA-Nordic Astrobiology Summer School. The summer school brought together graduate students and postdocs studying astrobiology in the US and throughout Europe. Several of the people Laura met during this trip became good friends and colleagues, even to this day.
LPI: When did you know that you wanted to pursue this as a career?
LR: If I had known astrobiology as a child, I’m sure that would have been my dream career. I didn’t actually learn about the field until I took a seminar in planetary habitability in college. I remember really enjoying writing my final report on the possibility of the inner planets having been habitable in the past. But even then, it wasn’t until that following summer when I saw Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon giving an interview for the TV show Through the Wormhole that I realized it was a field I could pursue as a career. In the interview, she was collecting samples from Mono Lake and talking about astrobiology, and it just looked incredibly fun to me. I stayed up all night reading through NASA’s webpages on astrobiology and learning all about the various facets of the field. That night I knew that I wanted to pursue astrobiology as a career.
LPI: Did you have a mentor or another person in your life who was influential to your decision or career?
LR: I was fortunate to grow up with a family that fostered my interest in planetary science and supported my decision to go to graduate school. I remember the summer before I started my Ph.D. program, my cousin, who had just finished getting his Ph.D. in physics, pulled me aside and told me the secret to getting a Ph.D. wasn’t about being smart but about being stubborn and refusing to quit. I’m glad he said those words to me, as there were certainly times when quitting sounded tempting!
In addition to my family, I’ve had several professional mentors along the way. My first was Dr. Carrie Masiello at Rice University; Carrie invited me to work in her lab and let me sit in on her lab meetings to learn more about the research process. She also reviewed my applications for summer internships, scholarships, and graduate school and gave me pointers on improving them; for that, I will always remain grateful. My second mentor was Dr. Chris House at Penn State, who took me on as a Ph.D. student. Chris always supported my research ideas and helped give me the confidence that I really could make it in the academic world. I was also mentored throughout my Ph.D. by Dr. Michael Callahan from Boise State. Mike taught me the importance of maintaining a high standard when conducting my research and inspired me to think about my long-term research goals (rather than just career goals). Finally, my most recent mentor has been Dr. Laurie Barge at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Laurie was my postdoc advisor and is someone I still very much look up to. She taught me the importance of work-life balance and how to strategize to achieve my long-term career goals. I’m grateful for all the mentors I have had throughout my career.
LPI: What is the focus of your research?
LR: My research is focused on understanding the possibility of an origin of life event in oceanic environments on early Earth and other planetary bodies. In particular, I study how genetic molecules, like DNA used in modern life and their building blocks could have formed or been delivered to prebiotic worlds. In addition, I am interested in developing analytical strategies that can facilitate the autonomous analysis of natural samples during planetary missions. Finally, it is a goal of mine to develop tools that would facilitate data sharing amongst origin of life researchers, as I believe that a thorough understanding of the abiotic chemistry of natural systems is critical to the search for extraterrestrial life and being able to distinguish signs of living versus non-living matter on other worlds.
LPI: What is the most unexpected or exciting result that you’ve encountered in your research?
LR: One of the most unexpected results I’ve encountered was during my Ph.D. when I discovered that what we call “redox-neutral” atmospheres (i.e., N2-CO2) could be just as efficient at generating organic compounds as reducing atmospheres (i.e., ones with more H; NH3 versus N2, CH4 versus CO2). A common perspective in the origins of life community is that a reducing atmosphere would have been much more conducive for generating organics and the building blocks for life. My work showed that neutral atmospheres were generating a diversity of organics and reacted with nitrogen heterocycles (the compound which stores information in DNA) to produce many of the same genetic precursors as reducing atmospheres!
From left to right: Pablo Sobron (InVADER PI), Jazmine Robledo (InVADER intern), and Laura in front of the R/V Thomas G. Thompson before departure to Axial Seamount from Newport, Oregon. The team set out to collect hydrothermal vent samples for the NASA project In-situ Vent Analysis Divebot for Exobiology Research (InVADER). InVADER aims to evaluate the feasibility of using Raman and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) to characterize the biogeochemistry of hydrothermal vents.
Laura holding a piece of a black smoker hydrothermal vent that she collected from Axial Seamount during her cruise for InVADER. Credit: Mitch Elend/University of Washington/Visions ‘21.
LPI: What do you most look forward to as it relates to planetary science over the next 10 years?
LR: I am really looking forward to the possibility of more sample return missions, like NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which is scheduled to return asteroidal material later this year, and Mars Sample Return. JAXA also has engaged in several sample return missions with Hayabusa2, which returned asteroidal samples in 2020, and the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which will return samples from Mars’ moon Phobos in 2029. Furthermore, the recently released Planetary Science Decadal Survey, which details work and missions that should be made a priority to NASA over the next decade, highlighted the science that could be done with sample return missions from the Moon, Mars, a comet, and Ceres! I know to some, the Moon may not sound as exciting as some of the other planetary bodies listed, but even the Moon provides a wonderful opportunity to determine how organic compounds chemically evolve in abiotic settings over geologic timescales — something you just can’t simulate in the lab!
I’m also super excited for NASA’s Europa Clipper to arrive to the ocean world Europa in 2030. Hopefully, one of the instruments onboard, MASPEX, will get the opportunity to detect and characterize organics generated in the subsurface ocean! As a prebiotic chemist, I love all missions involving organic characterization as it provides a metric for ground-truthing and informing the work we do in the laboratory.
Laura holding a piece of a black smoker hydrothermal vent that she collected from Axial Seamount during her cruise for InVADER. Credit: Mitch Elend/University of Washington/Visions ‘21.
LPI: What would be your dream research trip?
LR: Lost City Hydrothermal Field. In this environment, there is ongoing serpentinization (i.e., the hydration of olivine to serpentine and other minerals), which also leads to the generation of H2 gas. It’s an important site for origins of life studies because such reactions generate conditions that we believe could be conducive for the abiotic synthesis of organic compounds. In particular, I’d love to explore around the giant structures (the main tower ~60 m above the seafloor) in a human-occupied vehicle.
LPI: Do you have a favorite hobby or interest outside of work?
LR: I enjoy playing video games, hiking with my dog, scuba diving, and reading.
For more information, visit Dr. Laura Rodriguez.
