Gerardo Dominguez is a President’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activities Award winner who approaches his work from an experimental and theoretical perspective. His work at the Dominguez Lab (D-Lab) interdisciplinary research group on campus encourages the intersection of disciplines of science to study the abundances and distributions of isotopes of elements to apply basic principles to understand scientific problems in astrophysics, planetary science, and atmospheric and geophysical/chemical systems. NASA recently awarded him $1.2 million to help analyze dust particles collected from a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid 200 million miles from Earth. They are expected to hold clues about the origins of planetary bodies. Its age makes it a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system and helps reconstruct whether life exists or existed. “It will help us understand how cosmic dust and cosmic gas transformed into the planets, comets and asteroids that we have today,” Dominguez says. ​