Modesto Junior College speaker seeking signs of life across the universe
Wherever water flows, living things grow, pioneering astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild has found. With the NASA announcement this week that water is flowing on Mars, her talk at Modesto Junior College comes at the perfect time for the curious.
The TEDx speaker and winner of the 2015 Isaac Asimov award will speak at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the west campus student center of Modesto Junior College. The program is free, as is campus parking Friday evening.
Rothschild is primarily known for work she has done in the area of life found in extreme climates and will talk on the latest research on the topic of “The Search for Life in the Universe.” As she put it in her TED talk, “I look for aliens.”
Knowing that microbes can survive in space and that organisms might be spread through asteroids, the talk flier notes, “Life could be more common than previously thought.”
Scientific curiosity should be like an itch – you can’t sleep at night until you find the right answer or at least the next step.
Lynn Rothschild
Discoveries of water and carbon on several moons circling other planets in our solar system suggest the building blocks of life exist relatively close by.
She holds degrees from Yale and Indiana, and a Ph.D. from Brown University. She is credited as being a founder of the field of astrobiology. At NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, she leads a program in synthetic biology. She is also a professor at Stanford and Brown universities.
Rothschild comes to MJC between lectures in an international lineup. Her Stanford page notes her résumé includes talks at the Vatican and Windsor Castle, Mystic Seaport and the Royal Society of London. She appears frequently on radio and television programs, including the BBC, NPR, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, ABC World News Tonight and the History Channel.
Stanford professor and NASA Ames Research Center scientist Lynn Rothschild will speak at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Mary Stuart Rogers Student Center on the Modesto Junior College West Campus, 2201 Blue Gum Ave. The talk and parking are free.
This story was originally published September 29, 2015 at 3:29 PM with the headline "Modesto Junior College speaker seeking signs of life across the universe."