Voices Melisa Diaz
===

Melisa Diaz: [00:00:00] I'm sort of one of those strange people that says.

I'm ice agnostic. I don't care if it's in an ice cave in Slovenia, a glacier in Pakistan, ice in Columbus or the Arctic, or on Enceladus or Europa, in Antarctica; as long as there's ice and water and sediment, I'm happy. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: This afternoon I'm joined by Melissa Diaz, Assistant Professor in Earth Sciences, and the principal investigator of the Polar and [00:01:00] Environmental Geochemistry Lab at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her research interests are centered around the applications of geochemical techniques toward understanding physical systems and how biology and society interact with them.

Her primary research focus is the. Cryosphere, mainly the Antarctic and the Arctic, specifically Greenland, where she studies the transport, cycling and alteration of salts, nutrients, and atmospheric derived constituents. She also studies the intersection of urban geochemistry with environmental justice, social equity, and knowledge co-productions.

She was recently named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, the first Ohio State Scholar, and one of only 12 researchers selected this year for this prestigious honor, which supports the next generation of research leaders tackling global challenges.

Congratulations and welcome, Dr. Diaz, to Voices. 

Melisa Diaz: Thanks. 

David Staley: And I wanna start first with the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Program. First of all, tell us, tell us what this program is. [00:02:00] 

Melisa Diaz: Sure. So CIFAR is the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research,

and so, while it is a Canadian based organization, it attracts scholars from all over the globe and they have a number of research programs. And then they have this grant, really, that supports scholars from across the globe. And so, the Azrieli Global Scholars started with an endowment with funds from the Azrieli family, and so they put out this announcement every year and they attract fellows from a variety of different programs. Not all of them recruit each year, and so this fellowship, it funds me for the next two years. It comes with $50,000 to use for personal development and research, and it also allows me to join a program through CIFAR to work with the fellows

in that program, I have the opportunity to propose small research grants and projects. So, we actually have one that was recently selected and we have [00:03:00] another one that's pending. Yeah, it's, it's a really great training opportunity and it allows me to reach scientists that I normally wouldn't reach in the US.

David Staley: Well, so that was my next question. Are all the fellow scientists, are they all geochemists? 

Melisa Diaz: It depends on the program. So, I'm in one called Earth 4D: Subsurface Science & Exploration, and so it's thinking about the four dimensions of earth. Obviously, we think about 3D systems, but adding time as a fourth dimension,

and so, thinking about our planet, not only as its spherical holistic unit that we see it now, but considering its 4 billion years of history. And so, my program is very science focused, and there are a number of geochemists, but there are also physicists and microbiologists that are in that program as well.

It's actually the only earth science focus program through CIFAR right now. 

David Staley: Mm. And you say time is sort of the fourth dimension, backward in time; are you looking ahead at all? 

Melisa Diaz: Sure, yeah. 

David Staley: How far ahead? Not 4 billion years ahead. 

Melisa Diaz: As long as our models [00:04:00] predict something that seems accurate. We have folks that are making predictive models just a few short years into the future, but then folks that are thinking about how earth might change in the next a hundred, 200, 300 years.

David Staley: Hmm. 

Melisa Diaz: Most of it though, is a little bit back looking. 

David Staley: Well, I want to talk about the work of your lab, and I know you use geochemical tools to explore polar urban systems. Let's start first with what's meant by geochemistry in this context. I know what the geo is, I know what chemistry is, what's geochemistry?

Melisa Diaz: I like to think about it as looking at the chemistry of the environment, and so we have chemistry that most of us. Have taken either in high school or in college, but geochemistry really takes those foundations of chemistry and applies it specifically to Earth. So if we're looking at soils or water or the atmosphere, what are the chemicals?

What are the constituents of those different landscape units? 

David Staley: How is it that you're able, that you as a researcher are able to study such [00:05:00] very different environments? 

Melisa Diaz: With a lot of practice and some skill, and definitely luck. 

David Staley: Luck? 

Melisa Diaz: Luck. Yes. So, we are analytical focused in my lab. So we acquire instruments, we collect samples in the field, and then we process them either in the field or back here at Ohio State, and those instruments, sometimes they're better suited for water, sometimes they're better suited for soil; and it's really just finding the right applications for our different samples. We're really driven by questions, so what kind of questions are we looking to answer in the environment? 

David Staley: What are some of those questions?

Melisa Diaz: Oh, that's a hard question. How are nutrients moving through icy environments? How can ice overlaying water trap and reflect the chemistry of the water beneath it? Do you actually have to get through ice to understand processes at the sea floor? How are historical [00:06:00] practices in urban environments influencing resilience of people today?

So, these are sort of some of the broad questions that we're generally trying to answer in my lab. 

David Staley: You mentioned instruments that you used. Tell us about some of these instruments. 

Melisa Diaz: Sure. So I have right now an iron chromatograph, so it looks at the it looks at dissolved ions and samples, so those are elements that have either a positive or a negative charge.

David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

Melisa Diaz: I recently received an award from the college to acquire an x-ray fluorescence instrument. So, what that does is it shines, basically light on your samples, puts energy in, and then those elements fluoresce in your samples and it tells us about the bulk composition, so, how much iron or silica or aluminum is in a solid sample.

I have a super fun instrument. It has a crazy name. It's a high performance liquid chromatography inductively coupled plasma triple [00:07:00] quadruple mass spec. It's a, it's a... 

David Staley: There has to be an acronym. 

Melisa Diaz: Yeah, but it's not much better. It's an H-P-L-C-I-C-P-Q-Q-Q-M-S. It's not much better, but that instrument's really cool.

And so, basically what it does is it uses a column that's filled with a certain type of material or a resin, and it separates out the different compounds in a liquid sample. And so, let's say it's a, something like a size exclusion column. What that means is it has a resin that separates different molecules based off of their size.

So, it's a retention then, right? So some, the things that are smaller, move through quicker. The things that are bigger move through with more time. And so then this quadruple uses a series of magnets to actually then further chemically separate. And then we have a detector at the end, this mass spec that looks at, the, the bulk elemental composition of those specific elements. So that was probably a little bit confusing. 

David Staley: No, well, I, [00:08:00] that instrument and these others you're using this here in your lab in Columbus, or can these be used in the field? 

Melisa Diaz: Most of these are lab based, but some of them exist in other, in my other spaces as well.

So like in Antarctica, I have an ion chromatograph instrument, and then I just bought a plate reader, which I think most people think of a plate reader as something that'll count cells. So you remember those like 96 well plates that you probably saw in biology class? 

David Staley: It's been a while, but I think I remember.

Yes. 

Melisa Diaz: Yeah. 

And so typically folks in the life sciences will use those to count cells in a specific type of sample. We're actually using those to look at nutrients, so phosphorus and nitrate, and the one that we just bought is basically the size of a printer. And so we're not just taking that to Antarctica, but we're taking into the field in Antarctica.

So we can then collect samples directly from streams that only flow a few weeks during the year, and then analyze them right there. Because right [00:09:00] now the issue is. Those labs in Antarctica that we have at the US base, McMurdo Station, they're well equipped. However, we can't send a, a vast amount of chemicals and we can't really set up a true geochemistry lab.

Most of the time we collect these samples, they get put on a ship, and then I see them maybe five, six months later. 

David Staley: Hmm. 

Melisa Diaz: And so we have to try to make sure those samples are preserved during transport. With this cute little printer size plate reader, we can get data almost immediately in the field, which will be really great for our new experiments.

David Staley: It must be logistically difficult to do research in Antarctica. You just don't show up one day and say, hi, I am here. I'm ready to do research. 

Melisa Diaz: It's a pretty big endeavor to even get down, down there. So I leave in a couple weeks and I just got my flight itinerary and getting down there. So it's, it's an adventure.

So I fly from here to Chicago to LA to Auckland, to [00:10:00] Christchurch. There we... 

David Staley: In New Zealand? 

Melisa Diaz: Yeah. In New Zealand. Yep. And so then we go through some training. We go to the CDC, which is not the Center for Disease Control, but the clothing distribution center, and they give us government issued gear, and then we hop onto a military plane.

Yeah, 

so either a C 17 or an lc one 30, those ones have ski, and then we fly down to Antarctica and hope that we don't boomerang, which means we get part of the way there and then have to turn back around and try again tomorrow. 

David Staley: And then when you're on site, you have to negotiate, I'm guessing, with other researchers.

Melisa Diaz: So when we get on station, the US Antarctic program is, is a well-oiled machine. We have lab spaces in McMurdo Station. It's kind of like a small mining town. It's actually on the southern most active volcano in the world, Mount Erebus. It's active, it lasts. Had a small eruption in 2021. 

David Staley: Oh, okay. 

Melisa Diaz: Why did we build a base there, I'm not exactly sure, but [00:11:00] hopefully we won't have a catastrophic eruption anytime soon. And so this little mining town peak season has actually about a thousand people. 

David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

Melisa Diaz: Only a small fraction of them are scientists. Most of the folks in Antarctica at McMurdo Station are carpenters, janitors, cooks mechanics, helicopter pilots, people who support ops across the continent.

And then we as scientists have a set number of buildings that we can set up some labs, but we actually head out into the field and so we do most of our research using helicopter support. 

David Staley: Hmm. Well, I'm interested in one area of research that you conduct in astrobiology and ocean Worlds. Tell us, tell us about this research.

Melisa Diaz: It's still kind of crazy to me that this is where my research took me. So I'm, I'm a cryosphere scientist, which means I study icy environments, mainly Antarctica and Greenland, as you mentioned in your intro. But if it has ice and water and soil, then I'm interested and it doesn't really matter where that is.[00:12:00] 

And so when I graduated from Ohio State, I did a postdoc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And so I, I had an awarded position there as a postdoc scholar. So these are semi-independent postdocs. Whereas normally when you get a PhD and you do a postdoc and you are working under an advisor, there's the money goes through your advisor, they'll allocate maybe some budget to you.

But these postdoc scholars at Huey are, are actually pretty independent. 

David Staley: Hmm. 

Melisa Diaz: And so I have more so like mentors but I had my own research money. 

David Staley: Hmm. 

Melisa Diaz: And so they advertise these research scholars to the department that they're now being housed in. And so I had this scientist that reached out and said, your Cryosphere research is really interesting to me.

Have you ever thought about doing Ocean Worlds research? And I said, yes. I think that sounds really cool, but I haven't really found an opportunity to get my foot into the door. And so this colleague, his name's Chris German, he [00:13:00] actually was one of the co-leads for the network for Ocean Worlds. It's run through NASA and... 

David Staley: And when we say ocean worlds, what is it that we're talking about?

Melisa Diaz: We're talking about moons and other planets in our solar system or beyond that have ice covers and then liquid water oceans beneath. 

David Staley: Like the moon, one of the moons of Jupiter, I can't remember which one. 

Melisa Diaz: Yeah, like Europa, Europa or Indus or Titan. Those are sort of our best candidates and we're really interested in these moons because basically wherever on earth that there's water, there's life, and if you're trying to find life in our solar system, our best candidates are probably those that currently have water or have recently had water.

So there's a lot of interest in these moons because we're pretty certain they have water. Especially Enceladus. We had a mission in the late nineties, early two thousands, Cassini. It flew through a geyser that was emitting from the South Pole of Enceladus and [00:14:00] they sampled the geyser and it's liquid water, like it's, it's water in an on Enceladus.

And that's just crazy to think about. So, yeah, I, the ocean Worlds community has been very much so focused on physical sciences. They don't have as much representation for geochemistry and like earth-based cries for people. And so I got involved with the network for Ocean Worlds because they said we really want someone who can tell us a nutrient composition, think about how solutes are moving through water, how they're incorporated into ice, and then somebody who understands the cryosphere boots on the ground.

David Staley: That's super interesting to me. I'm also interested to know about the work that you're doing in Greenland. You say you work, you work both poles, I suppose. I, I find the work in Greenland, especially fascinating. You're looking at periodic Lake drainage. Tell us, tell us more about this research.

Melisa Diaz: Sure. So I am looking at glacial lake outburst, floods, or gloss as they've been more recently termed. And so [00:15:00] this is when you have meltwater from a glacier that pulls along the side of the glacier or is trapped by bedrock or some other boundary. And this water fills and fills and fills, and then eventually catastrophically drains.

These are really common in high Mountain Asia, as those glaciers are retreating. Very rapidly. When those ice dams or sediment dams fail in High Mountain Asia, they've wiped out complete towns. 

And so there's a lot of attention on these systems as geohazard, as geologic hazards that are affecting people and infrastructure.

Recently though, attention has shifted to some respect to Greenland as the second biggest ice sheet on our planet. And an inventory showed that there are thousands of these ice marginal lakes or or lakes that form along these glaciers around Greenland and some of these catastrophic lake drainages.

These cloths are huge, but no one has actually ever looked at [00:16:00] the chemistry before. So I was interested in this system. I learned about it from another colleague. And what's cool about it is that every time that that lake drains, so this one fills and drains every five to 10 years. Indigenous accounts in the area indicate that there's an algal bloom.

The fishermen report that their lores are covered by slime and that they can't catch halibut, which is a big economic resource for them. And so that got me thinking, well, there must be something happening there that's geochemistry. And so the work we're doing there is to sample the water to look at the concentrations and the ratios of different nutrients, and think about how much those lake drainages might be affecting fisheries, both modernly and into the future.

David Staley: Hmm. Any conclusions, even tentative conclusions at this stage? 

Melisa Diaz: Yeah, those lakes are super nutrient rich, and so when they're filling and filling and filling, the water that's flowing [00:17:00] underneath those glaciers is in contact with the rock, and so it's basically weathering that rock and collecting a bunch of nutrients.

Now, if that water were to just slowly discharge like it normally does into the ocean, it'll stay at the bottom of the ocean. There's no light there, and so it's not going to influence carbon production from photosynthesis. Instead though, when you store this water and you're dumping almost two cubic kilometers in like a week, that's like a million Olympic swimming pools into a small area that completely mixes the ocean water.

And now you can, you can see that there are actually high nutrients in that water. 

So we're working up the results. We're hopefully gonna publish them pretty soon. 'Cause it's. It's a lot. It's a lot. There are a lot of nutrients there. 

David Staley: Well and this just shows the the, the size of my ignorance, I suppose.

You're talking about algae and you're talking about nutrients. I just wouldn't have thought this was an, a possibility that far north? 

Melisa Diaz: The polar regions have some of the [00:18:00] highest nutrient concentrations for nitrogen and phosphate. A lot of that is partially because there's no sunlight for half the year.

Yeah. So there's, there's really no organisms that are using up those nutrients. And so when you seed them, when you give them a little bit more, there are organisms that are not necessarily dormant, but they're just waiting, waiting for that next, like tasty mor so of, of rock or iron or whatever's limiting.

And so when you give it to them, they bloom. 

David Staley: I am interested in the Metal Redlining network. Could you tell us a little bit more about this? 

Melisa Diaz: Yeah. The Metal Redlining Network started really with a scientist at Wittenberg University, and she was interested in thinking about this intersection of urban environments and geochemistry.

And so in the 1940s, the Homeowners Loan Corporation, they decided who would get housing loans based off of a variety of criteria.

One of them was race, and so what happened is [00:19:00] they were investing primarily in white neighborhoods. And not in black and immigrant neighborhoods. And so while this practice was abolished not that long after, sometime in the sixties or seventies, there's still traces of these racist housing practices that exist today,

and across Columbus. So if you look at what some would deem underserved or underdeveloped neighborhoods in Columbus, they were all redlined. So the, the Homeowners Loan Corporation drew red lines around those neighborhoods, and those residents could not get housing loans. And so their taxes stayed low.

The city did not invest in those properties. That also means that when we were doing lead paint abatement across the city, across the country, those neighborhoods typically did not have enough resources to strip the lead paint, take care of it in an environmentally safe way. So a lot of those houses are still painted with, with lead paint. 

David Staley: [00:20:00] To this day? 

Melisa Diaz: To this day.

And so what we did through this metal redlining network, we have people across six different states and they, we went and collected samples in the drip line, so that's close to the house. Imagine basically if the paint were to shut off and fall sort of in that like near vicinity of the foundation, in the middle of the yard and then near the road.

And so we can see. How the lead concentrations have potentially changed over time, and which neighborhoods still have like persistent lead concentrations. 

David Staley: Hmm. That's why the geochemist is involved in this project. What does geochemistry allow us to learn? 

Melisa Diaz: It allows us to make those measurements so we are able to use an instrument like that, XRF, the x-ray fluorescence to then look at the concentrations of lead in those samples.

But then it also gives us the opportunity to look at other potentially harmful metals. Is there lead? Is there cadmium, for example, that's associated other elements that [00:21:00] we don't want ourselves or our children being exposed to? 

David Staley: Hmm. Let's talk about the Girls on Rock program. What is this program?

I love the title. 

Melisa Diaz: So the, the Girls on Rock Program. It's actually part of a number of sister organizations exploring girls expeditions. It started originally with Girls on Ice, and so it brought girls to glaciers in Alaska and has now expanded actually even into Europe. Girls On Rock is a relatively new sister program in this Inspiring Girls Expedition family, and the goal is to take girls to accept girls into this program.

Between the ages of 16 and 17 and they go into the Rocky Mountains and they learn how to rock climb in the field, which is really exciting. They learn how to backpack and how to camp, and this really started because if you look at Boy Scouts of America. Boy scouts, trains, [00:22:00] boys to do outdoor exploration.

Mm-hmm. They learn how to camp Girl Scouts is really lacking in those skills. And so when we're thinking about developing workforce and skilled individuals for our future in this country, we are not training girls in the same way that we are training boys. And so this program is really meant to address that gap, to give these girls the opportunity to learn in the environment.

So their small research projects include ecology or they might look at soil lead concentrations again, or maybe they're looking at grain size. It's just really to get them to think experimentally and through the scientific method. They also have a number of art experiences, so they learn how to journal they learn how to write poetry, and we have a lot of opportunities for creative exploration.

David Staley: Hmm. On your site, since you brought this up on your site, you mentioned that you weave science and storytelling and [00:23:00] art to broaden participation in the geosciences. How, how do you do this? 

Melisa Diaz: With a lot of creativity. So I am a member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos slash Hispanics and Native Americans in science.

That is a huge name. And so we call it snis, which act, which actually had its national diversity in STEM conference in Columbus this past year. So through snis I do a lot of outreach. So I host sessions thinking about, how we can get more people involved in polar research to have diverse perspectives.

This includes making little cartoons. We have stickers that we create. My students are amazing artists and so they create sometimes little coloring books. I'm involved with the Bird, polar and Climate Research Centers, education and Outreach team, so we are now building. A lot of virtual reality tours. So my team was just in [00:24:00] Alaska.

We're deploying a, a robot underneath the ice to track chemistry over the winter in Alaska. And we actually had a, a GoPro that we put under the water to create a three dimensional tours. You can see the robot and everything moving under the water. And so I think that, you know, science is for everyone and.

The way that we communicate science can be quite varied. So we can communicate science either through our publications or through national conferences and talks, but I also go to high schools and middle schools and show pictures of Antarctica or share some of these products to think about how we can make science a little bit more accessible for everyone.

David Staley: What about storytelling and art in your research? Not just when you're doing outreach or working with students? 

Melisa Diaz: I focus on storytelling. From, from, that's focused on my [00:25:00] identity. So I am Caribbean American. My dad's Dominican, my mom's Puerto Rican, and I'm a first generation college student. So I, when I was six years old, could have never really imagined myself working in Antarctica.

I always loved snow and ice. I grew up in Massachusetts and gosh does it snow there. I also went to school in upstate New York. I've never known cold like that before. And I sort of serendipitously ended up in this situation. You know, we think about life and sometimes windows and doors open and close, and I found myself just really scanning the landscape and thinking about which windows or doors are now open.

That might seem interesting. I could have done probably 20 other things that would've been just as cool. I could have been a real estate lawyer. I have no idea. That sounds like it could be fun. But the this, this track that I found myself on was really, it was really enjoyable. And so that storytelling aspect, [00:26:00] it's not just talking about the data, but incorporating ourselves into science.

My identity is really important to me. I. Wear sometimes traditional earrings or jewelry when I'm in the field, earrings are kind of my thing. And actually, so my coloring page through Bird Polar, I made sure that there are some big earrings in there because I, I love them and I think that finding ways to express yourself in the field is important.

David Staley: Why ice? Why the focus on ice? 

Melisa Diaz: The last graduation for myself that I have ever attended was high school graduation. 

When I graduated my undergrad, which was a big deal for my family, I was, I'm the only person who has a bachelor's degree or a master's or a PhD Now. And I had the opportunity to go to Greenland.

Hmm. And I said, mom, I'm going to Greenland. That was the first time I had a passport. I had to go and get a passport. I had only been on, I think, three plane rides in my life, and here I was on a C one [00:27:00] 30 landing at Summit Station in Greenland. In the middle of the. And that field season was really difficult.

It was cold. I landed and it was minus 56. Doesn't matter if it's Celsius or Fahrenheit, that's cold. We slept in tents outside and I loved it. One of the things I thought was so cool in that environment is that you could look at this landscape and it was so pristine. And so the science that we could do there, we could answer questions that you can't answer anywhere else in the world because this environment is basically untouched, and that really intrigued me.

I love basic science. I love applied science too, but basic science really advances our fundamental understanding of how the earth works. And the polar regions are some of the only places that we can do like the most impactful, in my opinion, basic science. 

David Staley: Hmm. As you look over the field, geochemistry is a field,

what have been the biggest changes that have taken place say over the [00:28:00] last, I dunno, 40 or 50 years? 

Melisa Diaz: I think it's become a lot more interdisciplinary geosciences over time and geochemistry. Before we used to go out into the field, collect a few samples and say, oh, this is the cranium concentration of this sample.

Which means that that's it. That's, those are the data. But now I'm not an ecologist, but I work with a team of ecologists. I'm not an engineer. I work with teams of engineers and I feel that over time. We now have these amazing interdisciplinary and collaborative teams, and we can answer really hard questions because we have so much expertise coming from the outside too.

David Staley: Hmm. 

Melisa Diaz: So not only are we advancing now with collaboration, our analytical techniques, we can make way better measurements at higher resolution, lower concentrations, more sample complicated, like sample matrices. So what's the background of those samples than we've ever been before. And that has [00:29:00] really changed our fundamental understanding of, of basically how the world works.

David Staley: That's very interesting. Usually when I ask that question, it's, it's some sort of technology Oh, that's, that's changed the way that we, that, that we, you know, do our field. And you're saying it's it's a sort of an intellectual change. 

Melisa Diaz: Totally. Yeah. So like with, with the work that I'm doing it's the long-term ecological research project in Antarctica.

So I'm a co-PI in this project. I'm the only geochemist pi. And so the ecologist will come to me and they say, Hey, Melissa, we could only find this one species of worm in this soil, but then we couldn't find it in another one. Can you help us find out why? And so I'll say, well, this soil has this concentration of salinity or.

It's this age, or it's been this number of years since it last had water on it. And so then it allows us to think about how these extreme environments can, can harbor life. And these are questions that I don't [00:30:00] think we could have ever thought to answer even 25 years ago. But I see this, I see science becoming so much more collaborative and interdisciplinary, and I, this is, this is the future for it.

And that's the biggest change that I've seen. 

David Staley: Is it common for an earth scientist to work in both Antarctica and the Arctic? 

Melisa Diaz: I'd say it's common. For some of us, it's, it's not entirely common. Usually people pick one, one region. NSF manages all the US Antarctic bases. It's a little bit easier logistically to get to the Arctic.

I can take a commercial flight to Vic Alaska, the highest most settlement in Alaska. You can't take a commercial flight to Antarctica. So I find that people are interested in process. If they're interested in glacial dynamics, maybe they'll look at both. But typically it's, it's one or the other. I'm sort of one of those strange people that says.

I'm ice [00:31:00] agnostic. I don't care if it's in an ice cave in Slovenia, a glacier in Pakistan, ice in Columbus or the Arctic, or on Enceladus or Europa in Antarctica. As long as there's ice and water and sediment, I'm happy. 

David Staley: Tell us what you're working on now. What's, what's the next project for your lab? 

Melisa Diaz: I have a lot of projects going on, so I'm, I'm an assistant professor.

I'm in my. Starting. This is the start of my fourth year of being a professor. So my, my group is active. I currently have three graduate students, two postdocs, three undergrads, and a lab manager. It's kind of a lot and everyone's doing such amazing and cool stuff. So we just got word hopefully, we're expecting a press release soon. We have a NASA icar. It's a program focused on astrobiology research that was selected. And so this will fund us for the next five years to look at how organics are preserved and [00:32:00] transferred through ICE on Ocean Worlds in our solar system. So this is a big multimillion dollar project that just was selected from nasa.

I think we're one of three. So I we're looking into that realm. I have a graduate student who is doing more urban work, so she is trying to understand how drought in Ohio has affected stream chemistry and whether watersheds, so landscapes that have been managed by people are more resilient or less resilient.

How long does it take for those landscapes to, to rebound basically from drought. And so we have this really amazing data set from an agricultural watershed in Ka shockton. And then she'll be collecting samples here in Columbus. There, there, the drought here has gotten pretty bad the last few years, and so I think this will be really important for farmers and, and residents in Ohio.

And then we have another project where we're [00:33:00] looking at whether we actually have to drill through the ice on Ocean Worlds to understand its chemistry. So the surface of these ocean worlds, it's bombarded, it's getting a lot of radiation from Jupiter, from other from the sun. And it's really hard to drill through ice.

Mm-hmm. Some of the ice shells on these moons are like tens to 25 kilometers thick. But do you actually have to get there to understand what's beneath? And so what we're doing is we're looking at sea ice on earth and trying to see whether hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the C floor, whether those signatures are captured in ice.

David Staley: Melissa Diaz, thank you. 

Melisa Diaz: Thanks.

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer. [00:34:00]