FROM THE HEART OF USC

Viewpoint

EXPERT OPINIONS

“We’re going to be faced with two sets of habits: pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. And we’ll have to choose which to repeat.”

WENDY WOOD, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business, in an April 5 Washington Post article on how to establish and maintain healthy habits.

“What is striking to me is that there are just so many communities who have been marginalized and underrepresented or demonized in Hollywood, and just how meaningful it is for various communities when you see yourself finally represented.”

EVELYN ALSULTANY, associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, in an April 27 Today.com article on the importance of actor Riz Ahmed’s Oscar nomination.

“Women’s sports continue to get short shrift, which is significant when you consider the larger picture of girls’ and women’s efforts to achieve equal opportunities, resources, pay and respect in sports.”

MICHAEL MESSNER, professor of sociology and gender studies, in a March 24 Sports Illustrated article featuring his research on the wide disparity in television and online coverage of women’s and men’s sports.

Life on Mars

USC Dornsife research backs the Mars rover Perseverance’s search for signs of living organisms on the red planet. By Darrin S. Joy

The Mars rover Perseverance rocketed skyward on July 30, 2020, from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, hurtled through 300 million miles of space, and triumphantly set down in Jezero Crater, just north of the red planet’s equator in the eastern hemisphere, seven months later, on Feb. 18.

The robotic explorer features a powerful system for detecting signs of microscopic life called the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals. SHERLOC will search for subtle clues any microbes may have left behind using technology developed under the direction of USC Dornsife Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences Kenneth Nealson.

A renowned microbiologist and astrobiologist, Nealson worked to develop a component of SHERLOC called the deep ultraviolet microscope. The instrument uses a deep UV laser, which emits a tight beam of light that’s deep in the ultraviolet end of the spectrum.

Deep UV light has a shorter wavelength, enabling it to penetrate samples — including Martian soil and rocks — while causing organic molecules to glow with fluorescence.

The effort began in 1998, shortly after Nealson became a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an adjunct professor at Caltech. He continued work on the deep UV microscope for several years after joining USC Dornsife in 2001, working with a team that included Ph.D. student Rohit Bhartia, Jan Amend, professor of Earth sciences and biological sciences and divisioal dean for the life sciences, and Moh El-Naggar, Dean’s Professor of Physics and Astronomy and professor of physics and chemistry, as well as postdoctoral fellows and other students.

Their work showed that the microscope could be used to identify bacteria and could also be used on dry samples to distinguish many different molecules — a key necessity in the arid Martian environment.

The deep UV microscope is part of Perseverance’s robotic arm, where it is combined with other instrumentation that expands the number of chemicals the system can detect.

In what is the culmination of nearly 25 years of work on Nealson’s part, scientists deployed SHERLOC soon after the rover touched down. Should it detect possible chemical signatures of life, they can choose to bring samples back to Earth for deeper analysis.

“That is my dream,” Nealson says, “to bring back those samples.”