Charlotte Professor Wins A NASA Exobiology Grant
For the first time in the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s nearly 80-year history, a faculty member has won a NASA Exobiology grant. Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics Richard Allen White III will use the ultra-competitive grant in his research on microbialites, a kind of “living rock” that could hold the key to how life formed on Earth.
“NASA’s interest in microbialites is that they’re the ‘sign-posts’ for life on Earth,” said White, lead principal investigator for the grant shared with Pieter Visscher at the University of Connecticut. “The thought is that if we eventually go to a place like Mars, Europa or Enceladus, if we found these structures, then we could say in high likelihood life had been there; if we found them active, we would say life was still going on.”