How to Time Travel Without Fear

Betül Kaçar is a self-described gözü kara. The Turkish term refers to people from the Black Sea region of the country, but it has another translation as well.

“It means bold-eyed or fearless,” says Kaçar, an assistant professor in the Department of Bacteriology. “It means that I don’t know my place. I never did, and I think that served me well. It put me in a mindset that I could do anything.”

That dauntless disposition propelled Kaçar from her humble roots in Turkey to the forefront of astrobiology. A highly interdisciplinary field, astrobiology examines the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. Through groundbreaking approaches in her research group and leadership roles in prominent NASA initiatives, Kaçar is rewinding Earth’s clock billions of years to try to understand how life’s emergence and its early biological innovations may assist in finding life beyond our planet.

“We tend to think of the past as a failed state and that things get more optimal as they evolve, but that is not necessarily true. There is a past that we don’t yet understand, but we should.”