The Ohio State University’s School of Earth Sciences is proud to announce that Dr. Melisa Diaz, SES faculty member and polar geochemistry expert, will serve as co-lead of the Cryosphere Domain for NASA’s newly funded Investigating Ocean Worlds (InvOW) project, a ~$5M project led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and NASA AMES. The five-year, multidisciplinary program (to begin in 2026) aims to improve how scientists interpret organic molecules in data from future missions to icy ocean worlds, like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, in the search for signs of life beyond Earth. By bringing together ocean, polar, and space science expertise across 16 U.S. laboratories, the initiative will examine how physical, chemical, and potential biological processes shape organic signatures as they move through an ocean world’s subseafloor, ocean, and icy shell.

Dr. Diaz’s leadership in the Cryosphere Domain will be central to understanding how ice-related processes alter organic compounds as they transition through kilometers-thick ice shells, critical groundwork for maximizing the science return of NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission. Her research, which spans the geochemistry of ice and ice-covered environments on both Earth and other planetary bodies, uniquely positions her to contribute to this ambitious systems-level study that bridges Earth and planetary science in pursuit of life’s signatures across the solar system.

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