User:Oughtta Be Otters/sandbox/Kennda Lian Lynch

Dr. Kennda Lian Lynch is an astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist who studies polyextremophiles. Lynch's career has primarily been work affiliated with NASA. She identifies environments on Earth with characteristics that may be similar to environments on other planets; she creates models that help identify characteristics that would indicate an environment might host life. Lynch also identifies what biosignatures might look like on other planets. Much of Lynch's research on analog environments thus far has taken place in the Pilot Valley Basin in northwestern Utah, her work in that paleolake basin informed the landing location of NASA's Perseverance Rover mission--at another paleolake basin called Jezero Crater. Jim Greene, Chief Scientist at NASA, called Lynch "a perfect expert to be involved in the Perseverance rover." (https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-looking-for-life-in-ancient-lakes) Helping to select the proper landing site for NASA's first manned mission to Mars in 2035 is another of Lynch's projects. Lynch is frequently a featured expert on life on other planets, especially Mars. She has appeared in multiple television series, as well as the New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, and Popular Science.

Early life
Kennda Lynch is the daughter of Marlene Cosby and Kenneth Lynch. Both her parents worked at Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation, a defense contractor in Rockford, IL that worked on NASAs space shuttles. After seeing The Empire Strikes Back just before her sixth birthday kindled Lynch's lifelong passion for space, her parents were able to bring home pictures of space shuttles which further fed her interest. Other movies such as Space Camp, Explorers, and the Start Trek films kept her imagination alive. Her mother was a Trekkie, so they also watched television shows from that franchise together. Lynch jokes that her mother takes less credit for her interest, however, quoting Cosby as saying: “You were an alien from the beginning.”

Lynch's parents were deeply influential in other ways, as well. Her mother was a life-long Girl Scout and served as the chief executive officer of Drifting Dunes Girl Scout Council Inc. (https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/local-girl-scout-councils-merge-with-chicago/article_6207dd06-adcf-5115-b179-8c63fdf813e3.html; https://issuu.com/girlscoutsgcnwi/docs/adultrecognition19_program_book_gir) and was a zoology major who wanted to be a veterinarian. Her father also was a dedicated Boy Scout. Lynch, herself, has a long history as a Girl Scout, including being appointed as the student delegate to the National Girl Scout Program Conference. She was one of 40 Girl Scouts in the nation to attend "Marine Mystique: Exploring the California Coast," a Girl Scout Wider Opportunity. (http://heinonlinebackup.com/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/corlawfofe19&section=15)

Because of the scouting history in the family, along with her parents having childhoods spent outdoors, Lynch was raised spending a lot of time in nature. Her hometown had a lot of forested areas and parks that were easily accessible, plus family friends with a cabin in Wisconsin and a lengthy camping trip in Canada all added to her love of nature. In high school she worked at Camp Medill McCormick, a Girl Scout Camp in Northern Illinois, and was a volunteer for Trailside Stables.

Lynch attended Boylan Catholic High School, where she was on the student council and was a member of a group discouraging drug use and drunk driving. As a high school sophomore in 1991, Lynch was one of 40 Young Americans, a long-running program of the local newspaper, the Rockford Register, honoring extraordinary teenagers in the Rock River Valley. (https://www.rrstar.com/article/20110314/NEWS/303149874?template=ampart, https://www.rrstar.com/article/20110501/NEWS/305019926) She graduated from Boylan in 1993.

Education
Lynch chose to attend the University of Illinois for college, as part of the Illinois Morrill Engineering Program, planning to study general engineering. She also fell in love with biology through an internship with completed a summer internship Dr. Mark R. Patterson in the summer after Freshman year. During an internship at Kennedy Space Center she got to see a space shuttle liftoff (Gravity Assist Podcast) and also discovered and fell in love with the interdisciplinary field of Astrobiology. Lynch and some friends also ran a theater company, "Actors in the Attic." (https://www.lpi.usra.edu/features/101619/Lynch/) In 1999, Lynch was team leader for a NASA competition that was part of NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program at Ellington Field, near Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. That competition won Lynch and her teammates an opportunity to carry out an experiment aboard a airplane that escapes Earth's gravity. Ultimately, in 1999, Lynch graduated with a dual major in engineering and biology.

Lynch took graduate school classes part time, while she worked. In 2006, however, after a few years in the workforce, Lynch returned to school full time. First, Lynch earned a master’s in aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She then received a NASA fellowship upon her graduation in 2008 that assured her Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering at Colorado School of Mines. It was during her doctoral program that she began her research in Utah. She completed her Ph.D. in 2015.

Later, she moved to Georgia Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow, where she is continued her study of Mars analog environments.

Career
Starting with her summer internship at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in 1995, the majority of Lynch's work has been directly and indirectly for NASA.

Internships
Lynch spent her first summer in college interning for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, in their Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. She worked with biologist Dr. Mark R. Patterson, studying an underwater mountain range. The next summer Lynch earned a spot in the Space Life Science Training Program at NASA Kennedy Space Center. Other summer internships with Honeywell, and at the Kennedy Space Center led to a three-year co-op at Boeing’s International Space Station Contract at NASA Johnson Space Center.

Early career
After graduation, Lynch first worked as a Metrology Engineer, Corporate Engineering Division at Abbot Laboratories. Lynch then worked for Lockheed Martin for several years, followed by additional year at Jacobs Sverdrup. These two jobs were located in Houston, TX, at NASA Johnson Space Center. At first Lynch worked as a project engineer on human space flight in the Crew and Thermal Systems division, where she developed habitation hardware for International Space Station astronauts.

In the halls of Johnson Space Center, Lynch met Kathy Thomas-Keprta, a specialist on the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite. Through Thomas-Kerpta, Lynch met chief astrobiological scientist David S. McKay and went to work for him as a systems engineer. Working for McKay in the the Astromaterials and Exploration Science directorate, Lynch contributed to the prototyping of robots for missions to Mars.

Work during graduate school
When she returned to graduate school full time, Lynch served as a graduate research assistant, first at BioServe Space Technologies and then at the Laboratory For Atmospheric and Space Physics. Her work was affiliated with NASA through NASA's Harriett Jenkins Pre-Doctoral Fellowship which funded her role as a predoctoral research fellow at the Colorado School of Mines.

Postdoctoral work
For the first half of 2016, Lynch was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Rosenzweig Group at the University of Montana, in Missoula, MT. Then, she moved to Georgia Tech, where she was a postdoctoral fellow from 2016-2019. Lynch started at Georgia Tech in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, working with James Wray, then worked with Professor Frank Rosenzweig in the School of Biological Sciences. When Lynch received a grant from the Ford Foundation she continued working with those labs, but shifted her primary base of operations to the lab of EAS Assistant Professor Jennifer Glass. It was during this period that astrobiology research took off at Georgia Tech, and Lynch was part of the Georgia Tech NASA Astrobiology Institute team.

Since 2019, Lynch has been a staff scientist for Universities Space Research Association (USRA), located at Georgia Tech.

Teaching, outreach, and mentoring
Both as a student and a postgraduate professional, Lynch teaches and actively mentors students through the postdoctoral level and also works to expand diversity in STEM education. Even as an undergraduate Lynch was a Teaching Assistant in introductory engineering classes and a mentor in the Engineering 100 program. In her early years of working for at Johnson Space Center, she mentored high school and undergraduate students. In graduate school her teaching and mentoring were highly varied: she was a lab instructor, a teaching assistant, and even was a Teaching Fellow for Bechtel's K-5 Educational Initiative; throughout she has mentored undergraduate and graduate students and since 2013 she has been working with the SAGANet Virtual Mentoring Program. She served a two-year term as a NASA Students Ambassador from 2010-2012. Additionally, Lynch is a strong communicator and therefore does a lot of explaining of space science to the public, both directly and through the media.

Research
When doing outreach to young students, Lynch summarizes her biosignature research as "All life poops." In other words, all life uses energy and excretes waste products. Some of those waste products might be preserved and appear as biosignatures, telling us that life exists -- or formerly existed. Lynch identifies biosignatures in environments on Earth that might be analogous to ones on other planets, teaching us what signals we might use to

Paleolake basins on earth are ancient lakes that used to be very large and deep. Utah one is from Pleistocene Era, freshwater lake. Over time evaportated from climate change. Lots of lake sediments, microbial diversity develops after lake gone. Want to understand what ecosystems look like because did not understand there could be life there. Look for dna, how diverse, what microbial communities look like? How do they live there, what do they eat, where get energy? How interact?

found perchlorates -- Phoenix and Curiosity both found that they are on Mars.

perchlorates chlorine atom surrounded by four oxygyne atoms, oxidizer, has a lot of energy in it (use for firerackers and rocket fuel) -- much more perchlorates on mars than anywhere on earth -- theorize that it could sustain life

also toxic to humans on earth, so thinking ahead about how to keep humans on missions safe

Pilot Valley part of Great Salt Lake Desert -- pretty isolated, so there has not been a lot of human activity here (economic geology) -- was working with Dr. Sam Kunaves (?) (mentor, on Phoenix at the time, working on chemistry sensors -- he called her and asked if she knew about perchlorates) -- driving to Ames Research Center for NASA -- drove through Great Salt Lake and started wondering, wrote a grant to explore, changed direction of Ph.D.

perchlorate (a type of salt)-reducing bacteria

Mars when surface water retreated in the Hesparian and groundwater became dominant again.

-also starting a new study, in collaboration with European partners, of the Danakil Depression polyextreme analog environment in Ethiopia.

-other research interests: include origins of life and early Earth environments, and development of in situ instrumentation.

Lynch's current research is grounded in data from other planets suggesting that hypersaline environments are probably common throughout our solar system. Astrobiologists

brines, salts, and sediments

Pilot Valley is a hypersaline paleolake basin that contains several aqueous minerals the have been detected on Mars. perchlorates-reducing microbes co-habitating in an area that still has perchlorates -- first time found on earth. Thnking about Mars and Europa Hopes for Perserverence -- bottomset deposits. Fine grains made of clays and carbonates that can preserve organics and biosignatures. Because of the lake environment and the delta, three different areas could have brought biosignatures into the crater. -- could have come from watershed, from lake itself, transitional habitable zone (groundwaer moving through deposits after lake is gone) Really hoping to find signs of life in Jezro Crater -- STEM efforts --lifetime member of the girl scouts (giving back, reaching out, educating) -- lots of outreach

Dr. Lynch’s current research focuses on studying life in hypersaline environments because recent data suggest the brines are likely ubiquitous throughout the solar system and, especially on ocean worlds, are integral to habitable environments on planetary bodies.

Dr. Lynch’s primary field site is the Pilot Valley Basin in northwestern Utah, which is a specific analog for Martian Paleolake basins. In Pilot Valley, she combines sedimentology, geochemistry, microbial ecology and genomics through the use of a variety of bioinformatic tools to learn how the microbial community thrives in the basin sediments and how that translates to finding biosignatures in similar environments on other planets. The results of this work will be especially useful for informing the Mars 2020 mission team on the optimal places to look for biosignatures within the targeted Jezero crater paleolake basin. She also studies the microbial ecology and physiology of (per)chlorate reducing microorganisms as (per)chlorate and other chloride oxyanions are also seemingly ubiquitous throughout the solar system and can provide significant amounts of energy to support microbial ecosystems. She is also starting a new study, in collaboration with European partners, of the Danakil Depression polyextreme analog environment in Ethiopia. Her other research interests include origins of life and early earth environments, and development of in situ instrumentation.

“Ethiopia wants to be science leader, they want to be a science innovator,” says Lynch. “So we have to work with [local scientists] to help them work with their government to say, look, we need to protect the site a little bit more.”

Investigating the Metabolic and Environmental Flexibility of Biological Perchlorate Reduction in a Mars analog environment.

Investigating the Geobiology of Pilot Valley Basin, Utah: A Mars Analog Study of a Groundwater-dominated Paleolake Basin

Perchlorate, Water, and Life: the geomicrobiology of Mars analog soils

Unambiguous Detection of Extraterrestrial Microbial Metabolic Activity Using Differential Electrochemical Detection Source

Key Publications
Lynch has over fifty publications and conference publications as of early 2021. (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nrFF7aEAAAAJ&hl=en). She also serves as a manuscript reviewer for JGR Planets, Geobiology, Astrobiology, Planetary and Space Science, as well as a peer reviewer for grants with the NASA Exobiology Program Peer Review Panel and the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF). Lynch also serves on the organizing committee of many conferences in her field and is a frequent presenter at conferences.

Television appearances
Lynch is a featured expert in three television episodes about life on other planets:


 * Explained: Extraterrestrial Life (2018)
 * Glad You Asked: Will We Survive Mars? (2019)
 * Alien Worlds: Janus (2020) (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9985763/)

https://www.illinoisalumnimagazine.org/illinoisalumni/spring_2019/MobilePagedArticle.action?articleId=1481576#articleId1481576

 Kennda Lynch, ’00 ENG, ’00 LAS

-postdoctoral fellow in astrobiology at Georgia Tech

-catalogues the characteristics of the Pilot Valley Basin in Utah. “I study this as a modern analog to what could have been an ancient environment on Mars,”

- child growing up in Rockford, Ill.,

-loved space since young Lynch was captivated by space.

-While at Illinois, Lynch did internships at the Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers. There, she discovered astrobiology—the emerging study of life throughout the universe.

-master’s at the University of Colorado at Boulder

-Ph.D. at Colorado School of Mines

- began her work in Utah.

- passionate about sharing science

- 2018, Lynch appeared in Vox’s Netflix series Explained, where she discussed extraterrestrial life.

-she and her friends ran a theater company when at UI

https://futurism.com/the-byte/astrobiologist-gene-hack-traits-mars-settlers

-Lunar and Planetary Institute

-astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist

-thinks space agencies should gene-hack future astronauts and settlers so that they can better withstand life Mars

-Lynch argued it would be preferable to edit the human genome to survive on Mars rather than terraform it to be more hospitable. Otherwise, settlers would risk wiping out evidence of any native ecosystems, past or present.

https://www.space.com/mars-colony-human-genetic-engineering-tardigrades.html

need to genetically engineer people

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/astrobiologist-kennda-lynch-uses-analogs-on-earth-to-find-life-on-mars

-Lynch is an astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist

-studying life in extreme environments on Earth

-models for characterizing habitable environments and searching for biosignatures on other planetary bodies in our solar system and elsewhere.

-Prior to obtaining her doctorate, she worked as a systems engineer for the International Space Station Program and as a research engineer for the Astromaterials and Exploration Science directorate, both at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

-combines her engineering experience with her science training to work across multiple disciplines within the astrobiology community.

-Lynch’s current research focuses on studying life in hypersaline environments because recent data suggest the brines and salts are likely ubiquitous throughout the solar system and, especially on ocean worlds, are integral to habitable environments on planetary bodies.

-Lynch examines brines, salts, and sediments in the Mars analog field site in Pilot Valley, Utah.

-Pilot Valley is a hypersaline paleolake basin that contains several aqueous minerals the have been detected on Mars.

-It also maintains a shallow groundwater system that hosts an amazing subsurface microbial ecosystem that includes perchlorate (a type of salt)-reducing bacteria.

-Her team studies the microbial ecology of the basin, and especially the perchlorate reducing bacteria, as an analog transitional habitable zone that could have occurred on Mars when surface water retreated in the Hesparian and groundwater became dominant again.

-also starting a new study, in collaboration with European partners, of the Danakil Depression polyextreme analog environment in Ethiopia.

-other research interests: include origins of life and early Earth environments, and development of in situ instrumentation.

-very involved in mentoring students through the post doctoral level

-is actively involved in increasing diversity in STEM education

-Lynch is also a Ford Foundation Fellow and a

-proud lifetime member of the Girl Scouts.

-She was one of 100 women profiled in the book "Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier" and was featured in the 2018 Netflix series "Explained" and in the 2020 Netflix series “Alien Worlds".

https://www.popsci.com/winston-churchill-aliens/

Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist at Georgia Tech University

Lynch studies ancient lakebeds in extreme environments, similar to those on Mars. She currently researches a vanished ice age lake in Pilot Valley, Utah—an arid, windswept land whose lake sediments are home to microbial life.

https://ise.dev.engr.illinois.edu/newsroom/article/kennda-lynch

general engineering major, Lynch explored her interests in both engineering and biology and ended up majoring in both.

After her freshman year, completed a summer internship with biologist Dr. Mark R. Patterson. That summer she worked on building equipment for his research on an underwater mountain range. The experience inspired her to pursue both a GE and a biology degree at Illinois. In the summers, Lynch was working and exploring her career options. She interned at the Kennedy Space Center and was a cooperative education student with Boeing's International Space Station Program at Johnson Space Center.

Though she mainly worked with the human exploration program during these experiences, in her spare time she began to delve into the emerging field of astrobiology, which is the study of both life on earth and extraterrestrial life.

While she was at Kennedy Space Center, she attended a lecture on astrobiology and got hooked.

After her graduation from Illinois, Lynch went on to work as a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin Space Operations back at Johnson Space Center.

One day, on her lunch break, she realized she was standing behind Kathy Thomas-Keprta, one of the lead researchers who studied the Allan Hills meteorite. Thomas-Kerpta worked for David McKay, the chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Lynch struck up a conversation with Thomas-Keprta and expressed her interest in learning more about astrobiology. At the time, Lynch had started a part-time graduate program in biology that required some research hours. She asked Thomas-Keprta if Dr. McKay had any potential projects that she could take on as a part of her requirements.

This chance encounter led to Lynch meeting with McKay, who invited Lynch to work with him full time as a systems engineer.

As a member of McKay’s research group, Lynch halted her career in human space flight and became integrated into NASA’s astrobiology community as it was being formed. She began to realize how she could apply her engineering skills to planetary science and this emerging field of astrobiology.

“Being able to work for David McKay, who is basically one of the founding members of astrobiology, was fascinating and wonderful,” she says.

In McKay, she gained a mentor and the support she needed to go back to graduate school full time and dedicate her studies to astrobiology.

In 2006, Lynch left her professional engineering life and began her full-time graduate studies in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado, earning a NASA fellowship upon her M.S. graduation in 2008. This fellowship led her to pursue a PhD at the Colorado School of Mines, which she completed in 2015.

Since then, she has been working at Georgia Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow, where she is studying Mars analog environments.

Lynch studies a paleolake basin in Utah that contains minerals that have been discovered on Mars and is teeming with microbial life.

She studies this basin in particular because it could help us understand past environments like this that existed on Mars, how they could have been habitable environments, and what potential biosignatures — substances that provide evidence of life — could have been left behind.

Lynch's work is also significant because one of the potential landing sites for NASA’s 2020 Mars Rover mission is a paleolake basin called Jezero Crater.

Additionally, Lynch is working on proposing a landing site for the first human mission to Mars.

Chang, Kenneth. "How NASA found the Ideal Hole on Mars to Land in."ProQuest, Jul 28, 2020, http://ezproxy.castilleja.org/blogs,-podcasts,-websites/how-nasa-found-ideal-hole-on-mars-land/docview/2427512850/se-2?accountid=601.

Kennda L. Lynch, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said this “beautiful deltaic deposit” in Jezero could preserve hints of life from three different environments: from streams and smaller lakes upstream; from the Jezero lake itself; or in groundwater pushed to the surface from below.

“We know on Earth that those kinds of deposits preserve organics,” said Dr. Lynch, who has studied partially dried-up lakes in Utah that may resemble what Jezero used to look like.

Also seen at Jezero along what appears to have been the shoreline are deposits of minerals known as carbonates, almost like bathtub rings. The carbonates could be similar to limestone on Earth, which typically forms out of seafloor sediments and is often chock-full of fossils.

Although chemical reactions not involving biology can create carbonates, “This carbonate signature could indicate some kind of microbial life,” Dr. Lynch said.

''A Celebration of NASA Astrobiology NAI: CAN-7 Grand FinaleJan. 25, 2020. Newstex, Washington, 2020. ProQuest'', http://ezproxy.castilleja.org/blogs,-podcasts,-websites/celebration-nasa-astrobiology-nai-can-7-grand/docview/2345525504/se-2?accountid=601.

A Celebration of NASA Astrobiology NAI: CAN-7 Grand FinaleJan. 25, 2020

Weblog post. NASA Astrobiology Blog, Washington: Newstex. Jan 27, 2020.

09h40 – 10h00: Kennda Lynch, DDF Fellow. Georgia Tech; now Staff Scientist Lunar Planetary Institute: S3 (Subsurface, Subaqueous, and Salty): Looking for life in all the right places

Jon Hilkevitch Jon Hilkevitch is the Tribune's,transportation writer. "LOSE WEIGHT, THE NASA WAY STUDENTS GRAVITATE TO HOUSTON FOR A LITTLE ZERO-G ACTION: [CHICAGOLAND FINAL EDITION]." Chicago Tribune, Aug 29, 1999, pp. 10''. ProQuest'', http://ezproxy.castilleja.org/newspapers/lose-weight-nasa-way-students-gravitate-houston/docview/418927877/se-2?accountid=601.

Ellington Field, located a few miles from the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, is not just an airport.

Arriving at Ellington's Hangar 990 to receive their security clearances and flight assignments -- and feeling a tad inconsequential in the divine presence of astronauts (astronauts!) walking around in flight suits sporting buttons that say "Mars or bust!" -- are about 100 college students who are here because they won a NASA science competition.

The students, who will conduct research aboard a plane that escapes Earth's gravity, are actually very important guests of NASA. Some very well might be among the 21st Century's space adventurers and colonists. Others, however, after becoming very green VIPs during their flight on NASA's notorious "Vomit Comet," will opt for space program careers that are much closer to sea level.

NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program will fly about 400 student researchers from 96 colleges and universities this year on the KC-135, or "K-Bird," as it is also called. For about eight months before traveling to Houston, the undergraduates propose, design and build reduced-gravity experiments of their choosing.

The Illinois team's leader, Kennda Lian Lynch of Rockford, vows that "Whether I am an astronaut, a flight controller, a researcher, a politician or an educator, my life is charged to space development."

"It's better to eat before the flight. Dry heaves are much worse."

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/staff/lynch/

Prior to obtaining her PhD, she worked as a systems engineer for the International Space Station Program and as a research engineer for the Astromaterials and Exploration Science directorate, both at NASA Johnson Space Center. Hence, she combines her engineering experience with her science training to work across multiple disciplines within the astrobiology community.

Dr. Lynch is also very involved in mentoring students and post docs and is actively involved in increasing diversity in STEM education. She’s taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level and is a former director of the Engineering 100 Program at University of Illinois. At NASA, she was involved in mentoring several summer students, three NASA co-ops, and a post doc. She was also involved in the center’s educational outreach efforts. At the Colorado School of Mines, she served as a member of the president's committee on diversity and as a mentor for undergraduate researchers of diversity.

Dr. Lynch is also a Ford Foundation Fellow and a proud lifetime member of the Girl Scouts. She was one of 100 women profiled in the book "Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier" and was featured in the 2018 Netflix series "Explained".

Dr. Lynch loves sports (especially watching her beloved Chicago Bears), traditional and musical theater, hiking, snowboarding, and spending copious amounts of time with her family.

Volume 183, Issue 3, 29 October 2020, Pages 556-558

= Black in Nature = Author links open overlay panelPeterSoroyeKenndaLynchTatendaDaluJessicaWareAlexTroutmanAviweMatiwaneAngelicaPatterson

Available online 29 October 2020.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420313192

Being Black in Nature is just, well, second nature to me. I was raised to believe that being out in nature was just something you did; it was neither a “black” or “white” thing. Both my parents grew up with Boy/Girl Scouts, family farms, and regular access to the outdoors, so naturally, I did too. I also grew up in Rockford, IL which was known as the Forest City because of the vast abundance of forests, parks, and gardens in and around the city. Therefore, there were continuous opportunities to be in nature everywhere, and my parents and I took advantage of them. It also helped that our close family friends had a cabin in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, and some of my fondest childhood memories are of fishing and swimming in Mermaid Lake, or cross-country skiing though the snow-dusted forests. At the age of six, my parents took Black in Nature international as we spent two weeks camping through Canada, and I have glorious memories of that time. So, as I raise my multicultural son, who happened to be born in the beautiful mountain country of Montana, I intend to carry on the legacy that being Black in Nature is just second nature. (She has a son)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02257-w

NEWS

30 JULY 2020

= NASA has launched the most ambitious Mars rover ever built: here’s what happens next = “Perseverance is going to do so much for us,” says Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dallol-as-mars-analog-tourism

“The first time I saw it, and I walked through, I thought, ‘This is what I think Mars would look like,’” says Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who first visited Dallol in early 2019. “It gives us everything. It’s hydrothermal. It’s wet, it’s acidic, it’s salty, and it has iron and it has sulfur in it. It’s all these things together that would make sense for this type of habitable environment on Mars.”

Studying polyextremophiles in Dallol could also help us think about what life might look like in dramatically different but potentially inhabited worlds, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus or Jupiter’s moon Europa. “The more work we do to understand life here, and the different ways that life could run, it forces us to really expand our view of what habitable is,” says Lynch.

Meanwhile, Lynch plans to analyze some initial samples from her first trip soon, but in the meantime, she is already planning another visit in 2020, when she’ll look at the Dallol hydrothermal system though the same kinds of instruments we use on Mars.

And while mining and tourism might be good for Ethiopia’s economy—the country made nearly 50 percent more money from the travel sector in 2018 than it did in 2017—anything that harms the unique landscape around Dallol could jeopardize the country’s scientific potential. “Ethiopia wants to be science leader, they want to be a science innovator,” says Lynch. “So we have to work with [local scientists] to help them work with their government to say, look, we need to protect the site a little bit more.”

Ultimately protecting the Dallol hydrothermal system and the surrounding area will benefit more than just scientists who want to study it to learn about potential life on Mars. “It’s a national resource for the country,” says Lynch. “We want to help them do what they can do to protect it, value it, and benefit from it.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/summer-on-mars-nasas-perseverance-rover-is-one-of-three-missions-ready-to-launch/

“We’ve learned that Mars has a diversity of habitable environments,” says astrobiologist Kennda Lynch of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “People are more positive for potentially being able to find evidence that life, in some point in Mars’ past, existed.”

https://www.sfgate.com/tv/article/netflix-alien-worlds-nature-documentary-cgi-15789095.php

Alien Worlds semi-documentary

https://cos.gatech.edu/news/delving-perchlorate-diners-pilot-valley-utah. 2018

postdoctoral researcher working with James Wray, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS). and School of Biological Sciences Professor Frank Rosenzweig.

Lynch believes PRMs in Pilot Valley must be using the perchlorate. While doing her Ph.D., Lynch found the first known coexistence of PRMs and naturally occurring perchlorate in Pilot Valley. Because no one knows what these PRMs are, Lynch will spend the next year finding out. Supporting her work is a recently announced Ford Foundation fellowship.

Lynch’s Ford Foundation research aims to find out what microbial communities use perchlorate. What are the mechanisms at their disposal?

Lynch will examine whether active perchlorate metabolism takes place in Pilot Valley. If so, what other metabolic processes occur when that process is on?

Then she will use the findings to help define a model for perchlorate-driven life on Mars.

Lynch will continue to work with Wray and Rosenzweig. However, she will be based mostly in the lab of EAS Assistant Professor Jennifer Glass.

https://gatech.academia.edu/KenndaLynch/CurriculumVitae

https://www.rrstar.com/article/20110501/NEWS/305019950

ROCKFORD — Kennda Lynch has been fascinated with space for as long as she can remember, asking for an “Empire Strikes Back” cake for her sixth birthday and falling in love with the movie “Explorers,” starring Ethan Hawke, in 1985.

1991, among the 40 Young Americans - sophomore at Boylan

Lynch, 36, has been working with NASA since 1995 through a variety of programs as a student and in her professional career.

“Both my parents worked at Sundstrand." (Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation is located in Rockford, IL)

graduated from Boylan in 1993

Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of Illinois in biology and general engineering in 1999

master’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from the University of Colorado in 2008.

She is working on a Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.

Professionally, she has worked for Lockheed Martin, Jacobs Engineering, The Boeing Co. and Honeywell.

Along the way, she has researched and written about the effects of reduced atmospheric pressure on candidate plant species for bioregenerative life support systems and the effect of internal waves on benthic marine ecosystems.

“I’ve developed a network of friends all over the world,” Lynch said, ticking off trips or friends or projects in Morocco, Spain, Iceland, Germany and England. Lynch has spent countless hours at Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of NASA’s astronaut training and Mission Control.

“It’s the heart of the space program. You see Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft and Neil Armstrong around all the time.”

If Lynch has a worry, it’s that funding for the space program is constantly being threatened because of the after-effects of the Great Recession.

What we said then ...

Kennda Lynch, 16, 128 S. Prospect Court, is the daughter of Marlene Cosby and Kenneth Lynch.

She is a sophomore at Boylan Catholic High School. Kennda was one of six girls who performed a flag ceremony for presidential candidate George Bush. She was one of two girls chosen to serve as delegate for the National Girl Scout Program Conference and one of 40 girls nationwide to attend the Girl Scout Wider Opportunity called Marine Mystique. She is a candidate for a full-expense-paid introduction to engineering camp at Southern Illinois University this summer.

She has been a program aide at Camp Medill McCormick, volunteer at Trailside Stables, served on the Boylan student council and is a member of 3D’s, a group at Boylan that is against drunk driving and drugs. Kennda plans to attend a college with a strong science department, with the goal of being an engineer on a fighter plane and then part of the space program.

https://cos.gatech.edu/science-matters/season-2-episode-7-searching-life-mars-and-moons-gas-giants

The Chicago native remembers seeing The Empire Strikes Back in a theater with her parents. The birthday party that followed featured a Star Wars-themed cake, but her hunger for outer space, and movies about it, was just beginning.

Kennda Lynch: And then I got to see Return of the Jedi in the theatre. And then, you know, of course also seeing Star Trek, the major motion pictures. And my mother is a big Trekker, so I got to watch some of the old shows with her. And then growing up seeing those movies and then seeing like, you know, like Space Camp and there was another movie with Ethan Hawke, Explorers.”

For Lynch, realizing that dream first meant researching ways to help humans live and work in space. That started in the mid-1990s when she was an undergraduate with a dual major in general engineering and biology at the University of Illinois. She also interned at NASA, and worked on International Space Station projects as a cooperative education student with Boeing.

-brought her to Georgia Tech in 2016, at about the same time that astrobiology research was heating up in the institute.

Lynch, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and the School of Biological Sciences, is a member of the Georgia Tech astrobiology community. She’s also on the NASA Astrobiology Institute (or NAI) team based on campus.

Lynch’s research of a paleolake, or ancient lake, in the Pilot Valley Basin in Utah could help NASA determine a landing site for its Mars 2020 robotic Rover mission. And she’s working on a possible landing site for the first human-led mission to Mars, slated for 2035

Lynch may soon find out if those bio-signatures are there, since the Mars 2020 probe is scheduled to reach the planet in 2021.

That’s not the extent of her research on Mars. She is also part of a planning group for a human-led mission to the planet set for 2035.

Kennda Lynch: When it was very clear that we were marching down towards the road for our first human Mars mission and they actually set a date of 2035, NASA said well great, you know we have these orbital assets, we don’t know where to go, we need to talk to the Mars community who knows where to go. And so they decided to start the conversation with the planetary scientists and the engineers, you know, who are designing all the habitation systems and the planetary scientists who know Mars and know where things are, like well, let’s start coming together and seeing what are going to be good places that meet our science goals and have the operational capabilities for what we need to keep a human crew alive. And because it’s such a big deal, it’s something you do have to start really early because it’s such a much more complex question than a robot mission, you know, where we start landing site meetings about four to five years.

For human missions, we’re starting 20 years early because it’s such a complex question. We need to do a lot of data analysis.

Kennda Lynch: Oh totally. I totally—the way my mom’s explained it she’s like, “You were an alien from the beginning.” That’s what my mom says. She’s like, “You were just into it from day 1, and we just kept feeding it, and you just kept taking it, so we just kept feeding it.”

Well, my dad was about—anything I wanted to do, my dad was like, “You do it.” And my mom was—she was a zoology major who wanted to be a veterinarian and instead became a CEO of Girl Scouts, but you know.

https://pt-br.facebook.com/NASAArtemis/videos/631856431062734/