SPOTLIGHTS ON: Our PI featured as the Guest Profile in Populär Astronomi!
Image Credit: Rebecca Forsberg.
Is there life on Mars?: Yeşilbaş Lab is on mission to find out!!
We are thrilled to share that our PI, Merve Yeşilbaş is the Spring Profile ("Vårens profil") of Populär Astronomi (No. 1, 2026), Sweden's leading popular astronomy magazine! In a beautifully written feature by Rebecca Forsberg, Merve introduces our "space lab" and takes readers on the journey from Istanbul to Umeå to NASA and back again: all in pursuit of one question. “Are we alone in the universe?”
The piece dives into the heart of what we do: exposing minerals, organics, and microorganisms to extreme, Mars-like conditions and using vibrational spectroscopy to build a library of spectral fingerprints, which is a translation key between our lab bench and the data rovers and orbitals send home from Mars. As Merve puts it, "spectroscopy is your best friend, both on Earth and in space," while always keeping Carl Sagan's reminder close: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The feature also shines a well-deserved light on the team that makes this science possible.✨ The postdocs Alef dos Santos and Surendra Vikram Singh, PhD student Zoe Asimaki, and student assistant Frida Folkesson Ragnebrandt and spanning chemistry, geology, biology, and physics, exactly the interdisciplinary mix our questions demand.
A huge thank you to Rebecca Forsberg and Populär Astronomi for capturing not just our research, but the curiosity and care that drive it. 🚀✨👩🏻🚀