1. Kennda Lian Lynch is an American astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist who studies polyextremophiles.
32 Facts About Kennda Lynch
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Kennda Lynch has appeared in multiple television series, as well as The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, and Popular Science.
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Kennda Lynch is the daughter of Marlene Cosby and Kenneth Lynch.
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Kennda Lynch's mother was a Trekkie, so they watched television shows from that franchise together.
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Kennda Lynch's mother was a Girl Scout and served as the chief executive officer of Drifting Dunes Girl Scout Council Inc, and was a zoology major who wanted to be a veterinarian.
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Kennda Lynch was Girl Scout, including being appointed as the student delegate to the National Girl Scout Program Conference.
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Kennda Lynch attended Boylan Catholic High School, where she was on the student council.
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In 1991, Kennda Lynch was one of 40 Young Americans, a long-running program of the local newspaper, the Rockford Register, honoring extraordinary teenagers in the Rock River Valley.
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Kennda Lynch attended the University of Illinois, planning to study general engineering.
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Kennda Lynch completed a summer internship with Mark R Patterson and another at Kennedy Space Center where she saw a space shuttle liftoff and discovered the field of Astrobiology.
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In 1999, Kennda Lynch graduated with a dual major in engineering and biology.
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Kennda Lynch earned a master's in aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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Kennda Lynch then received the NASA Harriet Jenkins Predoctoral Fellowship to complete her Ph.
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Kennda Lynch first worked as a Metrology Engineer, Corporate Engineering Division at Abbot Laboratories.
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Kennda Lynch then worked for Lockheed Martin for several years, followed by additional year at Jacobs Sverdrup.
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At first Kennda Lynch worked as a project engineer on human space flight in the Crew and Thermal Systems division, where she developed habitation hardware for International Space Station astronauts.
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Kennda Lynch contributed to the prototyping of robots for missions to Mars.
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Kennda Lynch's work was affiliated with NASA through NASA's Harriett Jenkins Pre-Doctoral Fellowship which funded her role as a predoctoral research fellow at the Colorado School of Mines.
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In 2016, Kennda Lynch was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Rosenzweig Group at the University of Montana, in Missoula, MT, before moving to Georgia Tech, where she was a postdoctoral fellow from 2016 to 2019.
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Kennda Lynch started at Georgia Tech in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, working with James Wray, then worked with Frank Rosenzweig in the School of Biological Sciences.
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When Kennda Lynch received a grant from the Ford Foundation she shifted her primary base of operations to the lab of EAS Assistant Jennifer Glass.
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Since 2019, Kennda Lynch has been a staff scientist for Universities Space Research Association, located at Georgia Tech.
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Kennda Lynch teaches and mentors students and works to expand diversity in STEM education.
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Kennda Lynch served a two-year term as a NASA Students Ambassador from 2010 to 2012.
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Kennda Lynch identifies biosignatures in environments on Earth that might be analogous to ones on other planets, teaching us what signals we might use to recognize extraterrestrial life.
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Kennda Lynch looks for microbial DNA and strives to understand what the microbial communities look like with regard to diversity, aspects of life such as what they eat or how they obtain energy, and even how various microbes interact with each other.
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Kennda Lynch discovered the first known place on earth where there are both perchlorates and perchlorates-reducing microbes.
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Kennda Lynch won NASA's 2020 Selections for the Astrobiology Program Early Career Collaboration Award.
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Kennda Lynch has over fifty publications and conference publications as of early 2021.
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Kennda Lynch serves as a manuscript reviewer for JGR Planets, Geobiology, Astrobiology, Planetary and Space Science, as well as a peer reviewer for grants with the NASA Exobiology Program Peer Review Panel and the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship.
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Kennda Lynch serves on the organizing committee of many conferences in her field and is a frequent presenter at conferences.
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Kennda Lynch is a featured expert in three television episodes about life on other planets:.