Betül Kaçar
Born
Istanbul, Turkey
Alma materEmory University
Marmara University
Known forAstrobiology
Scientific career
Institutions

Betül Kacar is a Turkish-American astrobiologist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin. She directs a NASA Astrobiology Research Center exploring the essential attributes of life, its origins and how they should shape our notions of habitability and the search for life on other worlds.[1]

Education and Career

Kacar was born in Istanbul.[2] She was the first woman in her family to receive formal education.[3] She studied chemistry at Marmara University.[2] She received Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate fellowship to spend a summer conducting scientific research in Emory University studying organic chemistry.[2] She returned to Emory University in 2004, and eventually earned a PhD in Biomolecular Chemistry in 2010 in enzyme structure-function relationship.[4] Kacar transitioned to study origins of life after Ph.D. She was appointed as a NASA postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010.[5] She was awarded a NASA scholarship in 2011, followed by funding from the NASA Astrobiology Institute and Exobiology Branch in 2013.[2] She joined Harvard University in 2014, where she led an independent research group as a fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.[6] In 2015, she received the Templeton Fellowship and became a member of the Harvard Origins Initiative.[7] Kacar was named NASA Early Career Faculty Fellow in 2019. In 2020, she received the Scialog fellowship for her studies on life in the universe by the Research Corporation and Science Advancement.[8]

Research

Kacar's research encompasses the origins of life, early evolution, life in the universe and how the molecular mechanisms of evolution can be understood. She currently leads a NASA Astrobiology Center in molecular paleobiology to understand alien planets and ancient life.[9] She is the first Turkish woman and the youngest scientist to lead a NASA research center. She was the first to resurrect an ancient gene inside a modern microbial genome.[10] She coined the term paleophenotype, reconstructing and examining the evolutionary history of contemporary components and then tying their phenotypes into biosignatures to provide insight into innovations that are grounded in the rock record and thus in the geological and ecological context.[11] In 2020, she proposed a possible application of prebiotic chemistry, protospermia, sending the chemical capacity for life to emerge on another planetary body.[12] Her research team defined “evolutionary stalling” as an evolutionary mechanism to prevent a module from reaching its local performance peak and thereby imposes a genetic load, i.e., the organism carrying a stalled module suffers a fitness cost relative to an organism whose module performance is optimal.[13]

Kacar is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, in the Department of Bacteriology. [14] She is also an associate professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.[15][16] She has been described as a "prominent member" of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.[3][17] She has received over $9 million of grant funding as a lead investigator.[18]

Community work

Kacar has co-founded the only astrobiology outreach and grassroots network SAGANet that serves teachers and students in astrobiology research globally. In 2011 Kacar became a member of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science.[19] She was formerly part of the Global Science Coordinator for ELSI Origins Network aiming to increase early-career research scientist participation in the field of origins of life.[20] She discussed finding alien life in SXSW in 2020.[21] She partnered with the 2020 UN Women Generation Equality Campaign to support education of girls and women globally.[22]

Awards and honors

Asteroid 284919 Kaçar, discovered by astronomers using the WISE space telescope in 2010, was named in her honor.[1] The official naming citation was published by the Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature of the IAU on 8 November 2021.[23]

References

  1. 1 2 "284919 Kaçar". Minor Planet Center. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 TOA, Admin. "Betül Kacar Invokes the Past in Modern Bacteria". Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  3. 1 2 NASA Astrobiology (8 September 2017), Early Career Spotlight Series: Dr. Betul Kacar, retrieved 30 March 2018
  4. ↑ "An Interview with Betul Kacar, a PhD student at Emory University". Extreme Biology. 19 January 2009. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  5. ↑ "The Scientist is In: Dr. Betul Kacar". The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program. 1 December 2010. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  6. ↑ "Betul Kacar". edwards.oeb.harvard.edu. Archived from the original on 31 March 2018. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  7. ↑ "Betul Kacar". scholar.harvard.edu. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  8. ↑ "Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe Fellows Named". rescorp.org. Retrieved 6 February 2021.
  9. ↑ "NASA Astrobiology web". www.nasa.gov. 9 November 2020. Retrieved 6 February 2021.
  10. ↑ "Biologists Invoke the Past in Modern Bacteria, Quanta Magazine". www.quantamagazine.org. 18 June 2015. Retrieved 6 February 2021.
  11. ↑ Kacar, Betul; Guy, Lionel; Smith, Eric; Baross, John (28 December 2017). "Resurrecting ancestral genes in bacteria to interpret ancient biosignatures". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 375 (2109): 20160352. Bibcode:2017RSPTA.37560352K. doi:10.1098/rsta.2016.0352. PMC 5686408. PMID 29133450.
  12. ↑ "If we are alone in the universe should we do anything about it?". aeon.co. Retrieved 6 February 2021.
  13. ↑ Venkataram, Sandeep; Monasky, Ross; Sikaroodi, Shohreh H.; Kryazhimskiy, Sergey; Kacar, Betul (4 August 2020). "Evolutionary stalling and a limit on the power of natural selection to improve a cellular module". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117 (31): 18582–18590. doi:10.1073/pnas.1921881117. PMC 7414050. PMID 32680961.
  14. ↑ "Betul Kacar". Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  15. ↑ "Kacar, Betul | ELSI". www.elsi.jp. Archived from the original on 31 March 2018. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  16. ↑ "MCB Heads to the Stars with Astrobiologist Dr. Betul Kacar | Molecular and Cellular Biology". mcb.arizona.edu. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  17. ↑ "Betül Kacar: İstanbul'dan NASA'ya Uzanan Başarı Hikâyesi » Girisimci Kafası". Girisimci Kafası (in Turkish). 15 March 2018. Archived from the original on 6 July 2018. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  18. ↑ "A Hub For Origins of Life Studies - Astrobiology Magazine". Astrobiology Magazine. 20 April 2017. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  19. ↑ "Betul Kacar – Blue Marble Space Institute of Science". www.bmsis.org. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  20. ↑ "A hub for origins of life studies, Astrobiology Magazine". www.astrobio.net. Retrieved 6 February 2021.
  21. ↑ "SXSW Wonder House". sxsw.arizona.edu/betul-kacar. Archived from the original on 14 February 2021. Retrieved 6 February 2021.
  22. ↑ "I am Generation Equality: Betul Kacar, astrobiologist in search of life in the Universe". eca.unwomen.org. Retrieved 6 February 2021.
  23. ↑ "WGSBN Bulletin Archive". Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature. 8 November 2021. Retrieved 8 November 2021. (Bulletin #11)
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