Research Overview and Goals
Our research attempts to answer the question:
How do the surfaces of rocky planets acquire, sustain, and nurture life-essential chemical ingredients leading to habitability?
Our team members bring extensive expertise in astrophysics, geology, geochemistry, geophysics, fluid and atmospheric dynamics, and organic chemistry.
An overarching goal is to trace the life-essential elements from the protoplanetary disks in the solar system’s early history to the early prebiotic molecules on the surfaces of rocky planets, with a particular emphasis on the feedbacks between surface and interior planetary processes.
We will use observations from our own Solar System in terms of comparative planetology but will also construct possible pathways that may lead to chemical habitability, which can be utilized for exploration of other solar systems inand search for life on exoplanets. In other words, we will put together various recipes for making and identifying thermo-chemically habitable worlds by linking inner workings and surface dynamics of rocky planets at their youth.