2023 Jessberger Award to Jamie Elsila

I am delighted to introduce Jamie Elsila as the recipient of this year’s Jessberger Award. I met Jamie after she returned from service in the Peace Corps in Tanzania between college and graduate school, where she taught chemistry and math. She visited NASA Ames with Society Fellow Scott Sandford where she had done undergraduate research and published her first paper (Elsila et al., 1997) (Figure 1). I was a post-doc and had the pleasure of working with her when she was a graduate student with Dick Zare where she had her first meteoritic publication 20 years ago (Plows et al., 2003) and received her PhD in 2004. As large cuts to NASA’s astrobiology program were being proposed in 2006, Society Nier Prize winner, Danny Glavin and I had the fortune to get funding for a new isotope ratio mass spectrometer (Figure 2) as well as a hiring point for a civil servant scientist to join our laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for compound-specific isotope measurements needed to firmly establish the origin of amino acids detected in meteorites and in samples returned from comet Wild 2 by the Stardust mission. As a senior post-doc at that same laboratory at Ames, Jamie had modest experience with stable isotope work but a keen interest in astrobiology and extraterrestrial organic chemistry. I encouraged her to apply; she did and was hired as the top candidate. Then, as now, she can master a new topic and became expert at the challenging field of compound-specific isotope measurements of trace organics in extraterrestrial samples. In particular, the analysis of amino acids in Stardust foil extracts proved to be extremely difficult. Interferences with the chemical derivatization method used for the analyses due to borate contamination from the aerogel, the low abundances of the amino acid and amine targets in the samples, coupled with the loss of amino acid precursors from the foils over time in curation, all needed to be overcome to make the challenging measurement. After years of instrument optimization, she was able to spot the signature of extraterrestrial C to make the first detection of an amino acid, glycine, derived from a comet (Elsila et al., 2009). It is heartening to know that the same compound was observed in the coma of 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko by Rosetta’s ROSINA instrument many years later (Altwegg et al., 2016; Hadraoui et al., 2019). The mechanism of glycine formation at 67P was further investigated by the COSIMA instrument, which of course Elmar Jessberger contributed to developing (Kissel et al., 2007). Jamie is an expert in the analysis of meteoritic soluble organic compounds, having built a strong and successful research program in this area over the past decade. Her research in this area focuses on understanding the abundances, distributions, and stable isotopic composition of soluble organic compounds, and interpreting this information to answer important questions about the origin of these molecules and their potential astrobiological and astrochemical contributions to the Solar System. Her meticulous and systematic approach includes the search for bias in sample workup as well as the analysis. For example, she performed the first analysis of the H, C, and N stable isotopes of the same amino acids from the same extract from a range of CM and CR meteorites (Elsila et al., 2012). This finally eliminated the complication of different extractions, different methods, different instruments often invoked to explain conflicting results. She has generated the most extensive published studies of isotopic composition of various soluble organic compounds in carbonaceous chondrites to create a database used by the community in interpreting astrochemical reactions. She collaborates with modelers to use these new results to examine models for extraterrestrial chemical reactions, thereby FIGURE 1. Jamie Elsila, college student, studying CO ice at the NASA’s Ames Research Center in 1996. Credit: NASA/ Ames. (Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com.) Meteoritics & Planetary Science 58, Nr 8, 1173–1175 (2023) doi: 10.1111/maps.14039