Louisa Preston

Louisa is an astrobiologist, geologist, and author at the Natural History Museum in London. As a UK Space Agency Research Fellow her job is to study some of the Earth’s most extreme environments and the life (both human and microbe) that lives or once lived in them. She uses these sites as examples of the kind of places and types of life-forms we think might have once existed on Mars. She is also on the science team for the next European Space Agency Mars mission, the ExoMars 2020 rover ‘Rosalind Franklin’, which will drill into the crust of Mars searching for signatures of buried ancient life. Her other passion in life is writing, having written and contributed to four popular science books, with her own ‘Goldilocks and the Water Bears – The Search for Life in the Universe’ published by Bloomsbury in 2016.