Bernadette Mary Dineen’s fascination with space began in kindergarten with a newspaper clipping. The exoplanet HD 28185 b—a “giant” at nearly six times the size of Jupiter—had just been discovered.

“I think the teachers brought the clipping in just for fun, and to say: ‘Hey, look! We found a new planet!’” recalls Dineen, a Ph.D. student in chemistry at Tufts. “I didn’t know space was that big. I never forgot it.”

Indeed, that singular memory has been an indelible source of inspiration throughout her life.

Today, Dineen is an assistant in the Kounaves Planetary Chemical Analysis and Astrobiology lab, searching for signs of life on Mars. Her work includes looking for clues to the chemical components of a biologically abundant period in that planet’s history. 

About 3.5 billion years ago, Mars is believed to have had a life-supporting environment similar to that now on Earth. Buried glaciers revealed by NASA's Viking orbiters could have been large reservoirs of water, and the Red Planet’s rusty soil indicates the long-ago presence of oxygen.

But that chapter ended when Mars lost its magnetic field and was showered with radiation, transforming it into an extremely cold desert-like planet with an atmosphere mostly made up of carbon dioxide.

In simulation chambers, the Tufts lab investigates how compounds (including the building blocks of organic life) change when exposed to solar ultraviolet radiation. The lab’s work also contributes to the development of devices that could detect microbial life on Mars, as well as planets such as Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus.

“Mars, billions of years ago, may well have looked like Earth today,” Dineen says. “It had the ability to sustain life. If we understand how it began, it might tell us more about Earth’s beginnings too.”

Knowing Ourselves

Dineen’s abiding affinity for space is not confined to science alone. The science driving the search for life beyond Earth and the search itself are both essentially two parts of the same story, she says. 

In a TEDx talk at Tufts last spring, Looking Out Is Looking In, she challenged her listeners to consider the universe not only as an “outer space” to explore, but also as a place that can lead to introspection. As a channel of “pure curiosity,” it can inspire us to better understand ourselves and what it means to live on “our pale blue dot,” she says.

It is one thing to look up at the stars and marvel at the incomprehensible vastness of space. (We are, after all, only looking through a keyhole into infinity; our solar system is one of potentially tens of billions of others in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of the trillion-plus galaxies in the universe.)

But it is another, she says, to use that framework to deepen an awareness of our sense of wonder.

“We can work hard on getting an exact answer to a question, especially when that question is really cool, like, ‘Is there life beyond Earth?’” Dineen says. “But sometimes, we miss the reason why we’re asking that question to begin with.” 

She challenged her audience to consider the “cosmic connection” between wondering about the wider universe and looking deeper into ourselves, especially our comfortable assumptions and conceptions.

“If the universe can know itself through us, then why can’t we know ourselves through the universe? Let us push at the next boundary,” she says. Why not, she suggests, use that proclivity for starry wonderment to consider that the forms of life that may have evolved beyond Earth could look very different from what we imagine.

A Personal Journey

The value of an open, and receptive perspective is informed, in fact, by her own deepened sense of self. 

In an interview for the Boston Museum of Science, she describes the challenges she faced as a first-generation college student who grew up in poverty and how she has persevered in academia as an autistic woman in STEM. 

“As an autistic woman who has had to navigate a world that wasn’t built with me in mind, I know, frankly, a little something about perpetual wonderment,” she says, in her TEDx talk. “A lot of my life I had felt like someone from outer space, and maybe that’s one of the reasons I ended up studying extraterrestrial environments.”

When she was growing up, Dineen says, she was “constantly evaluating the why of my behavior,” which in turn fed the whys of the laboratory. 

She majored in chemistry at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, where she worked for three years as a lab technician before applying to graduate school. She also held a coveted spot among other young scientists developing new concepts for future explorations on Mars. As part of the NASA Astrobiology Ideation Factory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, she is helping shape astrobiology-focused space missions.

“Now that I dedicate my time to searching for life on other worlds, I also find myself wondering why we are the way we are,” she says.

Dineen’s musings have piqued the interest of both scientific and non-scientific audiences. In addition to her TEDx talk and several Museum of Science videos, she was invited by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to participate in a S-STEM Scholars & Pi panel in Chicago, and share her science pathway as well on the Strange New Worlds podcast, including her love of the original Star Trek series.

Dineen hopes that people will marvel at the universe’s mysteries and let the universe be a guide toward an inner journey, where so-called achievement is not only about knowing, but also about not-knowing, about expanded wonder and curiosity. 

“Searching for life beyond Earth will tell us many scientific things. But I believe the endeavor offers us more about ourselves, because searching and learning about the worlds beyond us and learning about the worlds within us are inextricably linked,” she says. “Looking out at the stars can you tell something about how to look in.”