Scholarship Award Alumni - Brooke Carruthers

As a child, seeing the IMAX film Hubble with its images of billion year old distant galaxies “swallowing me up whole from that massive screen” inspired Brooke’s sense of wonder, humility, and curiosity.  But in school she was most adept at biology. Her high school biology teachers introduced her to the Miller-Urey experiment, which tests the hypothesis that life arises from non-life chemistry.  She then saw that the field of astrobiology (which studies life on earth to understand its origin and the potential for life elsewhere) combined her fascination with space and her skills in biology and could answer her craving to know “Where did we come from?” and “Are we alone?”

In her research, she’s part of a group that investigates how life may have interacted and evolved with earth’s early environment, and understand what traces such life may have left behind as “biosignatures”.  She has specifically studied an enzyme which traces the global nitrogen cycle over billions of years and aids our understanding of how ancient life interacted with nitrogen on early Earth.  For Blue Marble Space Institute of Science she published several popular science articles, profiles on space scientists and a piece on the importance of including space science in the school curriculum.  She believes that sharing her awe and wonder about biology and space sciences “helps add valuable perspective to our everyday lives.”

Brooke is also interested in research in conservation and sustainable development initiatives.  She says, “When one spends time thinking about the possibility for life elsewhere, one realizes on a profound level how incredible the phenomenon of life is on Earth in all its iterations.”

Her dream is “to be part of future life detection missions within our own solar system, where I would serve to connect the world beneath the microscope to the world beyond the telescope in the next generation of space exploration.”