Dr. Bada has five decades of excellence in education and chemistry and is best known for his work on the origin of life on Earth as well as his research on organic compounds beyond Earth.
SAN DIEGO, CA, October 13, 2023 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Jeffrey L. Bada, PhD, has been included in Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Leveraging more than five decades of excellence in education and chemistry best known for his work on the origin of life on Earth as well as his research on organic compounds beyond Earth, Dr. Bada has earned distinction as a professor emeritus of marine chemistry and geochemistry in the geosciences research division for the University of California, San Diego. Since 1970 he has focused his efforts on researching and teaching courses on what he calls "biogeochemistry," including teaching a class that satisfied the science requirements for non-science majors. He is also a co-investigator at the Center for Chemical Evolution at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Dr. Bada was a NASA fellow in 1967-1968. He then served as an instructor for the department of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego in 1968. He continued his career as a research fellow at Harvard University in 1969 and returned to the University of California, San Diego later the following year as an assistant professor of marine chemistry for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He was promoted to an associate professor in 1974 and then to the director of the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training in Exobiology in 1995. At the same time, he was a professor of marine chemistry for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1980 until 2009, at which time he was appointed a distinguished professor. In 2010, he was further promoted to a distinguished research professor of marine chemistry, retiring from the role in 2011.
During his tenure with NASA, Dr. Bada played an integral role in the development of the Mars Organic Detector instrument package, designed to find amino acids and other organic compounds on the surface of Mars, which could be utilized during ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA missions. He also was the principal investigator for the development of spacecraft instrumentation, including developing the Urey instrument designed to find evidence of both extinct and extant life on Mars.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Bada has published more than 200 papers that have been cited 16,000 times in the fields of marine chemistry, geochemistry and biochemistry, as well as co-authoring "The Spark Of Life: Darwin And The Primeval Soup," which was published by Basic Books in 2001, "Inconclusive evidence for nonterrestrial isoleucine enantiomeric excesses in primitive meteorites," which was featured in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA in 2012 and "Desorption Electrospray Ionization Imaging Mass Spectrometry as a Tool for Investigating Model Prebiotic Reactions on Mineral Surfaces" for the journal Analytical Chemistry in 2013. The same year, he also authored "New insights into prebiotic chemistry from Stanley Miller's spark discharge experiments," which was published by Chemical Society Reviews. His most recent publication was "Volcanic Island lightning prebiotic chemistry and the origin of life in the early Hadean eon." in Nature Communications in 2023. He has received invitations to give talks to several private organizations, including the Kiwanis Club of San Diego, California, and the California Institute of Technology along with other Universities in the United States China, Europe and Russia. Most recently, he is writing the book An Adventurous Scientist, encapsulating his experiences of perpetual exploration and revelations in his professional life that will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Added to these works, Dr. Bada was key to strides in research on geochronology, having developed a technique for dating marine sediments by measuring racemization rates of amino acids. This method has been used in marine biology, paleontology and archaeology for dating organic materials and was later integrated into his work with NASA. His research even extended to the area of human dentition, discovering this principle could be employed to estimate the age of humans by analyzing teeth that form during early life using the racemization process for the age determinations.
Before embarking on his professional journey, Dr. Bada earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in chemistry, both from San Diego State University in 1965. Following these achievements, he attained a Doctor of Philosophy in chemistry from the University of California, San Diego in 1968. In the coming years, Dr. Bada intends to continue his research on exoplanets, a topic he is currently exploring in his latest literary endeavor.
About Marquis Who's Who®:
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America®, Marquis Who's Who® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Marquis celebrates its 125th anniversary in 2023, and Who's Who in America® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis® publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who® website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
# # #