Our World ALUMNA The Universe
Could Alien Worlds Host Life?
Laurie Barge ’09, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, investigates the origins of life on Earth to make sense of how life could form on other planets.
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Growing up in a small, rural town in Northern California, Carolina Cortez ’18 missed the community and culture she remembered from her early childhood in Imperial County on the California-Mexico border. But now, as a graduate of USC Dornsife’s School of International Relations and a new fellow in the Rangel Graduate Fellowship Program, Cortez is pursuing her dream of becoming a diplomat to a Latin American country, a career that would draw on both her American and Mexican heritage. “I want to give back to both of my communities,” she says. At USC Dornsife, Cortez completed a study abroad program in Bilbao, Spain. After graduating, she worked in thenSen. Kamala Harris’ office for a year before being accepted into the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals program. Upon her return from Germany, Cortez volunteered with a nongovernmental organization in Mexico. Now, thanks to the Rangel Fellowship, a five-year program that prepares young people for a career in the U.S. Foreign Service branch, she started an internship in Washington, D.C. in May with the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Civilian Security, Migration and International Economic Policy. —M.M.
FACULTY Latin America When Deisy Del Real’s studies on immigration took her to Argentina, she felt a sense of acceptance there that pleased her. The country had recently passed laws making immigration a human right, expanding constitutional protections to all people in the country regardless of legal status, and promoting mechanisms that ensured immigrants had access to legal services to help them start down the path to residency and citizenship. The United States could look toward Argentina and some other South American countries when visualizing its own immigration policies, says Del Real. Currently Turpanjian postdoctoral fellow at USC Dornsife’s Equity Research Institute, she will join the faculty in the fall as assistant professor of sociology. “The discussion tends to be open borders or full restriction, but there are a lot of things in the middle,” she says. Public education efforts might also be useful, Del Real adds, noting that some South American countries have launched programs aimed at inspiring empathy between immigrants and the local population. —M.M.
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F N A S A , E S A , T H E H U B B L E H E R I TAG E T E A M (S T S C I /AU R A ), A . N O TA (E S A /S T S C I) A N D T H E W E S T E R L U N D 2 S C I E N C E T E A M
If you rewound the timeline of Earth to the beginning and then restarted it, would you get life again? If you tweaked some major condition, like taking away the moon or the continents, would life reemerge? These are the questions astrobiologist Laurie Barge ’09 contemplates in her Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Barge, who received her Ph.D. in geological sciences from USC Dornsife, is researching how life first sprang up on Earth and which conditions are most essential to its emergence here — and on other planets. To do so, she simulates environments like ocean vents — which some scientists hypothesize played host to the first life forms — conducting experiments to learn more about their chemicals and minerals. Barge was inspired by the research of USC Dornsife’s Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences Kenneth Nealson, who used geology to search for signs of life on other planets, especially Mars. In addition to her lab work, Barge is the science lead for the InVADER mission, which is sending a probe down to the deepest depths of the ocean to understand how life forms in deep-sea vents. The more we know about the birth of life on our own planet, the better equipped we will be at finding signs of life on alien worlds, says Barge. —M.C.
ALUMNA Spain; Germany; Latin America; Washington, D.C.
