Origins Project Announces Postdoctoral Lectureship Award

Dr. Aomawa Shields has been named as the recipient of the 2016 Origins Project Postdoctoral Lectureship Award at Arizona State University (ASU), the largest award of its kind in the world. Shields will undertake a week-long residency at ASU, presenting a series of colloquia and a large public lecture.

Aomawa Shields featured as a participant in Season 1 of the FameLab USA competition in 2012. She was the winner of the competition’s Regional Heat 2 in Denver. From there, Shields presented at the National FameLab finals held at the 2012 Astrobiology Science Conference in Atlanta, where she received the Audience Choice Award. Videos of her FameLab presentations can be found at: http://famelab.arc.nasa.gov

Shields was also named to the 2015 class of TED fellows. Her recent TED Talk entitled, “How we’ll find life on other planets,” is available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/aomawa_shields_how_we_ll_find_life_on_other_planets

Aomawa Shields is an National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow and a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She is also a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute-supported Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington. Starting in 2017, Shields will take on a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California Irvine.