When Erika Flores applied for an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2014, she wasn’t quite sure if her undergraduate degree in environmental science was a good fit for a place known for its work much further away.
“I wanted to fix our planet,” Flores said recently. “I couldn’t imagine that I would ever explore space.”
Not only did she get the internship at La Cañada Flintridge Institution, Laboratory for Origins and Habitabilitybut her contribution there also marked the beginning of an ongoing partnership between Cal State Los Angeles’s civil engineering department and a laboratory dedicated to studying the origin of life.
“I didn’t see myself in an astrobiology lab,” Flores said from her office at the Los Angeles County Sanitation District, where she has worked as a technical assistant since 2023.
But as it turns out, knowing how microorganisms got into Earth’s water is valuable knowledge to those tasked with cleaning those water supplies today, said her mentor at JPL.
“There’s a lot of overlap between wastewater and astrobiology,” said Laurie Barge, a JPL scientist who co-directs the Origins and Habitability Laboratory with research scientist Jessica Weber. “It sounds weird, but it’s true.”
This symmetry between the biology of our home planet and more distant worlds has led to a partnership between Barge and Weber’s lab and that of Flores’ former adviser Arezoo Khodayari, an associate professor of civil engineering at Cal State LA.
After nearly a decade of collaboration, Barge and Khodayari recently received a grant from NASA that will cover up to six lab internships for Khodayari’s students over the next two years.
The award is one of 11 which NASA’s Science Mission Directorate awarded to universities that were traditionally not included in the pool for the influx of new scientists to the space agency.
“We are intentionally increasing equitable access to NASA for our nation’s best and brightest talent,” Shahra Lambert, NASA’s senior advisor for engagement, said in a statement.
The two scientists connected through Flores, who, at Barge’s encouragement, decided to pursue a master’s degree at Cal State LA while interning at the Origins and Habitability Laboratory.
While Khodayari’s research at the Environmental Sustainability and Pollution Control Laboratory at California State University, Los Angeles, focuses on combating pollutants here on Earth, she and Barge immediately recognized parallels with the Origin and Habitability Laboratory’s exploration of conditions that could support life throughout the universe.
“The fate of these chemicals in an aqueous environment is relevant to both areas,” said Khodayari. “All of these different projects have chemistry in common.”
Following the success of Flores’ internship, the two scientists began looking for ways to bring planetary science to students who may not have considered it as part of their education and who did not have access to the tools needed to conduct sophisticated research.
Eduardo Martinez was studying for his master’s degree in civil engineering in 2018 when Khodayari called him into her office and asked if he would be interested in working for JPL.
“I was a little stunned,” recalls Martinez, who was born in Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles. “I just thought, ‘JPL?’ The Jet Propulsion Laboratory?’”
He was immediately hooked. As a civil engineering student, Martinez had been interested in how phosphorus and nitrogen affect water quality, causing algal blooms and low oxygen levels when they are introduced into freshwater in large quantities. During his internship, he was lead author of a Research work with Barge, Khodayari and others on how nitrates react with iron compounds in aqueous environments.
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His work at the Origins and Habitability lab showed him that these same elements also play a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of life and are therefore of particular interest to NASA’s astrobiologists. “I hadn’t seen this connection before and it was just fascinating to see,” Martinez said.
This experience inspired him to pursue a PhD in geosciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he is studying how certain isotopic compositions in clay minerals in samples from Mars could indicate past life.
Since Flores first moved from environmental science to spaceflight, five Cal State LA students have completed internships at the JPL lab. The NASA grant will accelerate that process and expose more students to research opportunities that might not have occurred to them otherwise.
This summer, interns Julia Chavez and Cathy Trejo donned safety goggles and white lab coats to inject fluids into a ferric chloride solution. The experiment replicates the reaction between seawater and the substance that rises from hydrothermal vents – a source of energy for life on Earth and a possible mechanism by which organisms first evolved here.
“Five or six years ago, I wouldn’t have really imagined working in research,” says Chavez, who completed her master’s degree this year. “Here, I couldn’t imagine any other path.”
Read more: Ed Stone, JPL director and chief scientist of the Voyager mission, dies at the age of 88
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
