STEM

Rebecca (Becky) McCauley Rench is the Astrobiology Program Scientist in the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters. She leads the Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research  (ICAR)), which supports large, interdisciplinary astrobiology research teams, and the Planetary Science and Technology through Analog Research (PSTAR) program, which addresses the need for integrated interdisciplinary field experiments as an integral part of preparation for planned human and robotic missions. Additionally, she is the Program Scientist for Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover and the New Horizons mission.

Becky describes herself as a scientist that enjoys the big picture, enabling science in the laboratory and field, in the pursuit of exploration and advancing humanity as a space-faring species. In pursuit of this, over the past two decades she has built connections with a variety of people and organizations. In 2006, she received the Truman Scholarship and has since been privileged to be a member of an excellent cadre of individuals dedicated to public service. She participated in the Truman Governance Fellows program in 2007 while concurrently completing a NASA internship at GSFC with Dr. Paul Mahaffy focused on the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that would fly on Curiosity.

Becky earned her bachelor’s degrees in biology and chemistry at West Virginia University and her doctorate at the Pennsylvania State University with thesis research focused on microbial communities in low-energy cave environments. In between undergraduate and graduate school, Becky served as an AmeriCorps member and was stationed at the American Red Cross in the San Francisco Bay Area, during which she taught disaster preparedness to school-aged groups and responded to community needs after wildfire emergencies.