CPA - Postdoc Launch Seminar 2026 - III
Dear Postdocs,
We have another Caltech Postdocs Launch seminar this Friday!
We'll have two exciting talks from Dr. Joe Ouadah (BBE) and Dr. Sankhabrata Chandra (CCE), whose titles and abstracts can be found below.
And as always - FREE Lunch and beverages will be there before the talks start. To make sure we can order enough food, please RSVP here beforehand: https://forms.gle/BRjchMnj7FuFDj1r5.
What – Caltech Postdocs Launch
When – Friday, 10th of July, 2026, 11:45 AM
Where – Chen 130
Hope to see you there!
Best wishes,
Postdocs Launch Team
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How sociality evolves: the origins of same-sex sexual behavior
Dr. Joe Ouadah
Humans are motivated to understand our innate nature. One powerful way to do so is to comb the animal kingdom for similar traits to ones we possess, then endeavor to understand their evolutionary origins via the scientific method. This approach can surprise when we find deep biological conservation of attributes that have historically been considered to represent human exceptionalism (e.g., creativity, language, and capacity for culture). We may then be forced to reposition our ideas for what makes us, us. A revolution of this sort is ongoing for a social behavior previously expounded forcefully and prominently to represent a valley rather than a summit of human evolution: same-sex sexual behavior, or SSB. Recent studies of the great apes, mammals, and even insects have overturned the popular notion that SSB is unique to the human species, and in fact revealed that it is remarkably widespread among both males and females across the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, its evolutionary origins remain unclear. We have used a natural and robust case of SSB expression in Drosophila flies to mechanistically dissect the trait's origins, which can ultimately be traced to the process of speciation itself. The results provide a surprisingly simple model for how SSB can evolve, which due to the common ecological conditions that nurture it, may generalize broadly beyond Drosophila and even help us understand our own social nature.
Exploring Europa's Surface and Atmospheric Composition Through Analog Studies in Support of the Europa Clipper Mission
Dr. Sankhabrata Chandra
Jupiter's icy moon Europa, with its subsurface oceans of liquid water, is continually reshaping our understanding of planetary habitability and has become a primary target for planetary science missions. NASA's Europa Clipper Mission launched in October 2024 and is set to arrive in the Jovian system in 2030. It will provide an understanding of habitability on Europa with its various scientific instruments onboard. In this presentation, I will present my JPL/Caltech work on analog samples, which will be used to interpret the data from the two in-situ mass spectrometers, MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration/Europa (MASPEX) and Surface Dust Analyzer (SUDA), aboard the Europa Clipper Mission spacecraft.
MASPEX will be used to characterize the surface and atmospheric compositions of Europa. This will be achieved by studying the sputtering physics that are constantly happening on Europa. I investigated the electron sputtering of water ice containing the organics to understand how differences in chemical structure influence the observed sputtered byproducts.
The other mass spectrometer, SUDA, will collect ocean-derived ice particles from Europa's subsurface ocean as a plume. Here, hypervelocity impacts (several kilometers per second) will be analyzed using impact ionization time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry. Deriving accurate and reliable quantitative compositional information from spaceborne impact ionization mass spectra is a complex task, but it has recently become possible through the development of a new impact mass spectrometer (Hypervelocity Ice Grain Impact Validation Experiment, HIIVE) at JPL/Caltech. Here, I will present the salt clustering at different concentrations and pH levels, as the oceans of Europa and Enceladus likely have varying pH ranges.