16th
Annual Symposium: IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life
(CSEOL)
ASTROBIOLOGY:
LIFE
AMONG THE STARS
Friday,
May 13, 2005
9:10am: DAVID J. STEVENSON (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA)
What Makes Planets
Habitable?
A citizen of New Zealand and permanent U.S. resident, David
Stevenson received his undergraduate degree (with Honours, 1971) and
his M.Sc. (with Distinction, 1972) in Physics at Victoria University,
Wellington, and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, in 1976, from Cornell
University, where he studied under the tutelage of the highly distinguished
scholar E.E. Salpeter. A Research Fellow
at the Australian National University from 1976 to 1978 and a member of the
Department of Earth and Space Sciences at UCLA for the following two years, in
1980 he joined the faculty of the Division of Geological
and Planetary Sciences at CalTech where, since 1995, he has served as the
George Van Osdol Professor of Planetary Science. Past-Chairman of the Division of Geological
and Planetary Sciences (1989-94) and of the Faculty at CalTech (1997-99),
Professor Stevenson has served also as a Visiting Professor at Cornell
University (1986-87) and as a Visiting Fellow both at Victoria University, New
Zealand (1994) and at the Australian National University in Canberra
(1995). Recipient of numerous awards –
including a Fulbright Fellowship (1971-76); the Urey Prize of the American
Astronomical Society (1984); both the Whipple Award (1994) and the Hess Medal
(1998) of the American Geophysical Union; and an Honorary Doctorate from his
alma mater, Victoria University in New Zealand (2002) – in 2004 he was elected
a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Stevenson’s research focuses on the
internal structure and evolution of planets, the application of fluid dynamics
and magnetohydrodynamics to the understanding of such structure and evolution,
and the origin of solar systems.
10:00am: STEVEN W. SQUYRES (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY)
Spirit and
Opportunity: Latest Results from the Mars Rovers
Born in Woodbury, New Jersey in 1956, Steve
Squyres is a product of Cornell University (B.A.
Geology, 1978; Ph.D., Planetary Science, 1981), where he has been a faculty
member since 1986 and is now the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy. Before joining the Cornell faculty, he was a
Research Scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in northern California. Dating from his days as a Graduate
Student Associate of the Voyager Mission Science Team, for more than two
decades he has played an active role in 16 space flight missions – to comets,
asteroids, and solar system planets – currently serving as a member of the
Imaging Science Team for the Cassini Mission to Saturn, Co-Investigator on the
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission, and Principal Investigator of the recent
highly successful Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Recipient of two NASA Public Service Medals,
the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Space Science Award,
the Harold Urey Prize of the American Astronomical
Society and the Carl Sagan Memorial Award of the
American Astronautical Society, he has been honored
also as recipient of Cornell University’s Stephen and Margery Russell
Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Squyres’ research interests center on the robotic
exploration and photometric and spectroscopic properties of planetary surfaces,
and the geophysics, geochemistry, and tectonics of Mars, Venus, and icy
satellites.
11:10am: CHARLES
ELACHI (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and
CalTech, Pasadena, CA)
Born in Lebanon, Charles Elachi was educated at the University of Grenoble,
France (B.Sc. Physics, 1968); the Polytechnic Institute, Genoble (Diploma Ing.
in Engineering, 1968); the California Institute of Technology (M.Sc. 1969 and
Ph.D. 1971, both in Engineering); the University of Southern California
(M.B.A., 1978); and UCLA (M.Sc. Geology, 1983).
Principal Investigator on numerous NASA research and development studies
and flight projects, he is currently
Co-Investigator on the Rosetta Comet Nucleus Sounder experiment and Team Leader
of the Cassini Titan Radar experiment investigating Saturn and its
surroundings. A member of the National
Academy of Engineering and recipient
of NASA’s Distinguished
Service Medal, Exceptional
Scientific Achievement
Medal, and two Outstanding
Leadership Medals, Dr. Elachi has also received the
Nevada Medal, the Nordberg Medal, two ASP Autometric
Awards, the Takeda Award, the Wernher von Braun Award, the Dryden Award, the
Pecora Award, and both the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Distinguished
Achievement Award and the IEEE Medal of Engineering Excellence. In 2002, he was named Distinguished Alumnus
of the Year by UCLA’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences. Widely known for his role in the development
of a series of radar systems for the Space Shuttle that allow images of Earth
to be obtained through thick blanketing layers of clouds, systems that
penetrate even into the uppermost layers of soil to give hints of what lies
below, since 2001 he has been Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and
Vice President of the California Institute of Technology.
1:30pm: LYNNE HILLENBRAND (California Institute of Technology,
Pasadena, CA)
Earth-based
Search for Jupiter-sized Planets Beyond the Solar System
Lynne Hillenbrand, reared in suburban Philadelphia, received her undergraduate training at Princeton
University (A.B. Astrophysics, 1989).
Her advanced degree is from the University of Massachusetts (Ph.D.
Astronomy, 1994) where her work focused on regions of recent
star birth and the accretion of dust and gas to form stars at the beginning of
the evolutionary sequence that leads to relatively old main sequence stars like
the Sun. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
California, Berkeley, where her research centered on understanding star
formation in the Orion Nebula Cluster, an area of the sky
especially promising for revealing the conditions under which most stars in the
Galaxy form. Dr. Hillenbrand then moved
to Caltech, where she held a second Postdoctoral Fellowship and turned her
attention to star formation at the extremes: in its earliest stages and at its
lowest masses. Since 2000, she has been
a member of the Caltech faculty, currently serving as an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Astronomy where her Introductory Astronomy and Advanced
Astrophysics courses are highly regarded.
Her research has been directed most recently towards understanding the
evolution of circumstellar disks and the process of
planet formation in these disks. A parent of two (Emma, aged 7; and Gillian,
less than a year), Professor Hillenbrand is a pioneering young scientist who
quite notably has proven capable of handling the disparate responsibilities of
mother, wife, and world-class scientist/educator. Using some of the world’s premier
astronomical telescopes and research facilities, her studies
continue to focus on young stellar populations and on the gas- and dust-rich disks that surround them.
2:20pm: JON M. JENKINS (SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA)
Space-based Search for
Earth-sized Planets Beyond the Solar System
Jon Jenkins, brought up in the shadow of the Kennedy Space
Center in central Florida, is a product of the Georgia Institute of Technology
(B. Electrical Engineering, with Highest Honors, 1987; B.Sc. Applied
Mathematics, 1988; M.Sc. Electrical Engineering, 1988; Ph.D. Electrical
Engineering, 1992). In 1992 he was
appointed a Principal Investigator at the SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial
Intelligence) Institute in northern California where he has served as a
Principal Investigator on NASA’s Pioneer Venus Guest Investigator Program
(1992-94); the Venus Data Analysis Program (1994-95); and the Planetary
Atmospheres Program (1995-97, 1998-2000).
An outstanding student at Georgia Tech where he held the President’s
Scholarship, the President’s Fellowship and an NSF Fellowship, his career has
blossomed at the SETI Institute where he has been recipient of two NASA Group
Achievement Awards for his contributions to SETI. Since 1995 he has been Co-Investigator on
NASA Ames’ Kepler Discovery Mission, an innovative and technically highly
ambitious project designed to search for Earth-like planets far beyond our
solar system. In 2000, his seminal work
on the Kepler Mission was honored by his selection as recipient of the NASA
Ames Space Science Division Annual Award.
As Co-Investigator of the Kepler Mission, Dr. Jenkins is responsible for
designing and developing the heart of the system, a signal processing chain
that will survey some 170,000 Sun-like stars in order to detect transiting
Earth-like planets where life might possibly exist. His task is demanding, involving development
of the critical tools that will allow the Kepler photometer to attain an
observational precision far greater than previously achieved.
3:30pm: DANIEL
S. GOLDIN (The Intellisis Corporation, San
Diego, CA)
Discovery of Life on
Other Worlds: What Will it Mean?
Dan Goldin -- educated at the City
College of New York (B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering, 1962) and in UCLA’s
Executive Management Program (1983) -- holds the distinction of being NASA’s
longest serving Administrator, an appointee of three U.S. Presidents (G.H.W.
Bush, W.J. Clinton, and G.W. Bush). A
visionary, credited with transforming NASA into a fiscally responsible and
scientifically innovative agency, he led NASA to boldly set an agenda for a
quarter-century of space exploration.
Mr. Goldin initiated NASA’s Origin Program to study how our solar system
formed, how life on Earth began,
and to explore whether life
exists elsewhere
in the Universe. It was his vision to search for Earth-like
planets within a hundred light-years of our own; he has been a vigorous
proponent for exploration to determine if water and life have existed elsewhere
in the solar system; and it was under
his direction that repairs in orbit were first made to the Hubble Space Telescope. Prior to his nearly ten years of service as
NASA’s Administrator, Mr. Goldin oversaw the development the Compton Gamma-Ray
and Chandra X-ray Observatories while he was also Vice President and General Manager of the TRW Space and Technology
Group. Today, he is a Senior Fellow at
the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, where he is engaged in the
development of biologically inspired robots and computers, and is founder of
the Intellisis Corporation, which focuses on high
tech consulting and biologically based technologies. A member of the National Academy of
Engineering, Mr. Goldin is recipient of numerous
honorary doctorates and awards from national leaders and leading organizations
in the US and around the world.
4:20pm: EDWARD L. WRIGHT, Moderator (University of California, Los Angeles)
Panel Discussion/Audience
Participation: The Search for Life on Other Worlds
Upon completion of his undergraduate work at Harvard
College (A.B., summa cum laude,
Physics, 1969), Ned Wright spent one year at the Naval Research Laboratory
working on the long-range propagation of underwater sound before he began his
graduate studies at the Harvard College Observatory. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society
of Fellows while finishing his dissertation based on observations made with a
1-m-diameter telescope carried to 30 km altitude by a helium-filled
balloon. After receiving his Ph.D. in
Astronomy (1976), he was a member of the Department of Physics at MIT before
coming to UCLA as a Professor of Astronomy in 1981. Since 1978, Dr. Wright has been a member of
the Science Working Group for the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE), an
Earth-orbiting satellite designed to measure radiation produced by the Big
Bang. A expert on cosmology and infrared
astronomy, he currently is Interdisciplinary Scientist on the Science Working
Group of the Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly, the Space InfraRed
Telescope Facility [SIRTF]), a project with which he has been involved since
1976, as well as Co-Investigator on the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), a
mission launched in 2001 as a follow-up to the COBE discovery of fluctuations
in the early Universe and designed to observe the formative stages of
superclusters of galaxies. He is the
Principal Investigator on the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE),
scheduled for launch in 2008. For his
work on COBE, in 1992 Dr. Wright was awarded NASA's Exceptional Achievement
Medal. Co-convener of this Symposium, in
1995 Professor Wright was named CSEOL Distinguished Scientist of the Year.
IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution
and the Origin of Life (CSEOL)
Though most human institutions --
universities included -- are notably compartmentalized, nature is not. Each discrete scientific discipline explores
only a part of the natural world. Yet
all parts are intertwined, all are interdependent. Knowledge of one can have important impact on
understanding the others. There is an
obvious need to bridge the gaps. At UCLA
this need is met by CSEOL: The IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of
Life.
Formally organized in 1985 under the
auspices of the University of California-wide Institute of Geophysics and
Planetary Physics, CSEOL is not only broad in scope and markedly
multidisciplinary, but in energy and style is lively, informal, interactive,
and collegial. By bringing together
developing and established scholars drawn from differing disciplines and
academic backgrounds, CSEOL promotes interdisciplinary
research and learning.
CSEOL All-Campus Symposia
1990 The Endangered Earth 1997
Evolution! Facts and Fallacies
1991 Major Events in the History of Life 1998 Engineering the Human
Germline
1992 Evolution of Humans and Humanness 2000 Gold Medal
Symposium on the Origin of Life
1993 Creative Evolution?! 2001 Evolution in the Computer Age
1993 Humans and the Environmental Crisis 2002 Extinctions in
the History of Life
1994 Evolution and the Molecular Revolution 2003 Are We Alone in the Universe?
1995 Origin and Evolution of the Universe 2004 The Origin
of Animals
1996 Origin and Evolution of
Intelligence 2005 Life Among the Stars
16th Annual
Symposium: IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life (CSEOL)