With the success of the recent Mars Rover Curiosity landing, Cedar Crest College is bringing a NASA to the Lehigh Valley to provide insight into space exploration.

Jennifer Stern, Ph.D., a scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Planetary Environments Laboratory, will present a lecture, 7:30 p.m. Nov. 15, Alumnae Hall. The program is free and open to the public.

Stern's lab specializes in studying the atmosphere and surface of Mars and developing instruments to make geochemical measurements on planetary surfaces. She is a member of the science team for the Mars Science Laboratory Rover Curiosity, which landed in Gale Crater on Mars in August.

She is also a team member on the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) Instrument Suite, one of the 10 instruments on Curiosity, which uses mass and laser spectrometry to measure the chemical composition of the atmosphere and surface of Mars.

Stern received a B.A. in geology-biology from Brown University and a Ph.D. in geochemistry from Florida State University, where she developed analytical techniques for stable carbon and oxygen isotope and trace metal analysis of environmental waters. She decided to apply her interest in stable isotopes to astrobiology as a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Of Stern's visit to campus, Marianne Staretz, associate professor and department chair of chemical and physical sciences at Cedar Crest, said: "Mars exploration is a topic of great interest to so many people, and we are thrilled to have a scientist who is an integral part of this exploration work share her knowledge with us. I am also excited that our students studying chemistry can see another way that their growing knowledge of chemistry can be used."