All Articles

Gabbie Ledesma awarded Iowa Space Grant Consortium undergraduate fellowship

Author: awood | Image: awood

Gabbie Ledesma, a senior geology major, has been awarded an Iowa Space Grant Consortium undergraduate research fellowship for 2019-2020. This will provide her will a stipend to do independent research with Elizabeth Swanner. She will continue her investigations of manganese enrichments in lake sediments in order to better understand Mn enrichments in the former lakebed in Gale Crater, Mars. This follows her summer internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she investigated lake samples using LIBS – laser induced breakdown spectroscopy. The instrument she used is set up to simulate the analytical environment on Mars and is the same technique as ChemCam on NASA’s Curiosity Rover.