During her years at CC, Brook (Holcombe) Nunn ’98 spent her days like many of her fellow students: studying, playing intramural sports, and lots of backpacking. But during this time she was also falling in love with science and academia. So much so that she has since devoted her life to research and professorship.
“I started and became the Director of the Environmental Proteomic Resource Center in order to more easily collaborate with labs that had intriguing questions that could be answered with the technology that my lab had developed,” says Nunn. “Essentially, becoming a resource center allowed others to access our research progress and techniques for use in their investigations through a cost center structure.”
Over the years, in addition to studying ocean microbes, Nunn began to investigate bacteria that live in the Arctic and Antarctic ice structures. Her investigations of extremophiles led Nunn to become a faculty member in the Astrobiology Program at the University of Washington.
“When the pandemic started the University of Washington Astrobiology program had to come up with an innovative way to engage their graduate students over a weeklong hyper-focused workshop event,” says Nunn. “I developed a zoom-based simulation of a life detection mission for the graduate students. NASA headquarters got wind of our event and watched the final debate.”
And so began her work with NASA. Nunn was asked to lead NASA’s network for life detection. In this role she coordinates meetings for over 40 research scientists and technology developers for NASA Missions to get them to collaborate and think about what is needed for missions to succeed. She also developed simulated missions to detect life – a novel way to train scientists through an intense role-playing, complex, high-level scientific game models.
Nunn points to her time at CC as building a foundation for her innovative thinking. She also sees her education as helping her better understand how she, and others, can learn best.
“Getting hands on research and working closely with professors really helped, but more importantly, CC helped me realize that my brain works well on the Block Plan. It’s harder now that I have so many projects to manage, but I think much of my success is due to the fact that I can really dive into a project, analyze diverse data and get the research out to the public in a publication.”
Nunn has even taken her enthusiasm for Block Plan teaching and incorporated it into a one-month long Crime Scene Investigation Forensic Chemistry course that involves a crime the students must solve through evidence collection, personal interviews, discovery sleuthing, and a wide range of forensic analytical chemistry techniques.
When asked what the biggest challenge is in her work, Nunn says that it’s the pace and volume of change that’s hardest to keep up with. “Since I am curious about so many topics, and my lab does research on a wide range of organisms and in a range of environments, keeping up with the latest research on all those different topics in addition to developing technology that will help us answer those questions can be tricky,” she says. “Sometimes it feels like a losing battle since science moves so fast.”
But it’s also this wide range of interests that keeps Nunn passionate about her work. “I love that I can decide to investigate anything that I think is interesting or that I feel like my lab can offer new perspective on,” she says.
As for her future work, Nunn has three main areas of focus for her lab: developing predictive biomarkers for harmful algal blooms, understanding how corals adapt to climate change and searching for biomarkers for robust species to inform managers for propagation studies, and developing peptide assays for mission-ready mass spectrometry for life detection missions through the analysis of peptides and proteins from a wide range of extremophiles all over earth.
To learn more about Brook and her work, visit her website.