Jake Simon, Assistant Professor in Astronomy, was selected as a 2023 Scialog Fellow for the Signatures of Life in the Universe (SLU) program. SLU is a program involving early-career rising stars, interested in pursuing collaborative, high-risk, highly impactful discovery research on untested ideas applicable to creating breakthroughs in understanding planetary signatures of life and the search for signatures in the Universe. The program has a format in which participants are encouraged to engage in dialog and form new research teams, through interaction with a collection of scientists who approach the problem from different perspectives and disciplines. 

Scialog meetings are attended by about 50 early-career Scialog Fellows and 8-10 distinguished facilitators, with the goal of identifying bottlenecks, finding avenues for breakthroughs, and building new scientific teams to pursue these ideas. The SLU program is jointly sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) and the Heising-Simons Foundation, with additional support from NASA and the Kavli Foundation