College of Sciences

Community engagement has illustrated notable educational applications of the Life Detection Knowledge Base (LDKB). The webtool's utility as an educational resource for next generation mission planners and astrobiologists was demonstrated when Georgia Institute of Technology astrobiology course instructor Jennifer Glass, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, adopted it for a class project across several semesters from 2022 to 2023. In her graduate course, Seminal Papers in Astrobiology, Glass assigned students a biogenic or abiotic stance on a seminal astrobiology case study, such as the debate on the oldest microfossils. Students constructed and iterated arguments and evidence on their chosen topics for inclusion into multiple LDKB entries. A second example of the tool’s success in education came from a collaboration with the Young Scientists Program internship through the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. Through both efforts, students developed arguments and supporting evidence for inclusion in the LDKB, gaining useful skills in peer reviewing, scientific writing, and scientific debate.

In an article published in Physics Magazine, School of Physics Ph.D. student Jingcheng Zhou and Assistant Professor Chunhui (Rita) Du review efforts to optimize diamond-based quantum sensing. According to Zhou and Du, the approach used in two recent studies broadens the potential applications of nitrogen-vacancy center sensors for probing quantum phenomena, enabling measurements of nonlocal properties (such as spatial and temporal correlations) that are relevant to condensed-matter physics and materials science.