To NASA and beyond

Graduating geology student Conner Lesh lands dream internship

By California State University, Bakersfield

December 3^rd, 2022

If the sky is the limit for what one can do with a degree from California State University, Bakersfield, geology major Conner Lesh wants to push that frontier even further. He has his sights set on Mars.

Soon after he graduates from CSUB’s School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering this month, Lesh will start an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working with Dr. Katie Stack Morgan, the deputy project scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission. A lifelong astronomy enthusiast with visions of working at NASA full-time after graduate school, Lesh is excited to launch the next phase of his life.

“NASA would be a dream job,” Lesh said. “I kind of stopped thinking of it as a dream and decided I just want to make it happen.”

Before he starts his internship in January, Lesh, 24, will take some time to celebrate earning his bachelor’s degree. The Bakersfield native graduated from Liberty High School in 2016 and attended Bakersfield College before transferring to CSUB in spring 2021, briefly pursuing an engineering degree before finding his love of geology.

“It's exciting to be done with this part, because I can move on to the part where I can really focus on what I am definitely interested in,” Lesh said. “It’s also a bit of a relief to get past this point, because I’ve taken a bit of a long road.”

In the stars

Though geology wasn’t Lesh’s initial major as a college student, his first course in the subject lit a fire in him. He soon connected it with a love of space that he had shared with his family since he was a child.

“When I was younger, we used to do a lot of stargazing up in the mountains,” he said. “We’d go up and time our camping trips if there was a meteor shower during the summer. We continued the idea of stargazing at my grandparents’ house; we’d go over there and eat, and then we’d all go in the backyard and set up our chairs and watch for satellites and meteors.”

On his family camping trips, Lesh would also go on walks with his grandmother, who had a rock garden at her home and introduced him to rock collecting. It was because of that early interest in “cool-looking rocks,” Lesh said, that he decided to take the introductory geology class at BC with Robert Lewy and Mike Oldershaw that would change everything.

“The deeper I got into it, the more I wanted to know,” he said. “Each class I’ve taken, I’ve been very interested and invested in. I think that’s a common theme when it comes to science for me, going back to when I was young: just curiosity driving me through classes and wanting to know more.”

Laying the groundwork

Lesh has enjoyed the smaller class sizes that CSUB offers and has been able to get involved with various extracurricular activities on and off campus. In addition to restarting the Geology Club and serving as its vice president, Lesh has participated in a couple different research projects.

Over the last year, Lesh has worked with Dr. Liaosha Song, whose research centers around carbon sequestration, a method to capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide. In Dr. Song’s lab, Lesh has been studying the composition of sandstone, trying to see what factors determine porosity. The more porous a rock, the more carbon it can store, he explained.

“Conner excelled in my geophysics class and in my research lab,” Dr. Song said. “It is a pleasure to work with him.”

In July, Lesh also took part in a research cruise, a project CSUB has worked with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on since 2018. With mentor scientists and other CSUB students, Lesh helped to collect ocean floor samples. The project was led by geology department chair Dr. Anthony Rathburn, who called Lesh an exceptional student with a bright future ahead of him.

“During the research voyage at sea, his scientific abilities and his enthusiasm to be working as a scientist were clearly evident,” Dr. Rathburn said. “Conner's breadth of knowledge impressed everyone, and I am confident that he will excel in his research internship and will thrive in graduate school on his way to becoming a planetary geologist.”

Like all geology students, Lesh had to complete a field camp as part of his degree requirements. Lesh was warned ahead of time about the difficulty of the University of Arizona field camp he signed up for but assumed the challenge would be primarily academic. With five-plus weeks of daily hiking this summer and an itinerary that took him and his group through Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and California, Lesh soon found the trip would be a physical challenge too.

“Some people say that camp has the hardest hikes out of all the camps, and they were definitely tough,” he said, adding that the experience required him to fill in a blank map with geologic features like formations and faults. “I’m happy that I went to that camp because I feel like it made me a solid field geologist. Although that’s not what I’m going to be doing, having that background is important because you always do a little bit of it throughout your career.”

Feeding his curiosity

CSUB hasn’t just given Lesh research opportunities and prepared him as a geologist. Support from the geology department recently helped him attend the Geological Society of America conference in Denver in October, and it was there that he met Dr. Stack Morgan, the NASA scientist studying Martian sedimentology who he will be working with during his internship.

“It’s a dream come true and is still almost unbelievable,” Lesh said of the internship. “I have thought about working at NASA and even JPL since elementary school, so this opportunity is like checking an item off a bucket list.”

At the conference, he also got more information on his options for graduate school, which he is in the process of applying for now. Combining his interests in astronomy and geology, Lesh has decided to study planetary science, specifically the surface of Mars.

“My favorite subdiscipline in geology is geomorphology, which is basically the study of the surface and how that changes because of the various processes that control that,” Lesh said. “I wanted to take my love for studying surface processes and then translate that over to something astronomy related, so I decided that Mars is what I’m interested in studying.”

Though he doesn’t yet know where he will go for graduate school, Lesh has applied for the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowships Program, submitting a graduate research project proposal called “A Deeper Dive into Valley Formation at the Perseverance Rover Site, Mars.”

“If you get that, that opens up pretty much any opportunity,” Lesh said of the fellowship program.

As a student at CSUB, Lesh has learned the importance of seeking out every opportunity to learn more and work toward his career goals. He encourages other students to ask professors about getting involved in research or conferences. Beyond that, he wants them to follow their passions.

“In the sciences, it’s really important to feed your curiosity,” he said. “Don’t let other people tell you, ‘Oh, you should do this or that.’ You need to feed your curiosity because you’ll be more driven to get through your classes and to discover more.”

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Footnotes

Story by Kelly Ardis, communications specialist, School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering (NSME); lead photo and field photo provided by Conner Lesh, Geology Club photo provided by Jennifer Rubalcaba