Ask An Astrobiologist

SYNOPSIS

Our guest is Dr. Bonnie Teece, a current postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Origins and Habitability Laboratory, where she researches life detection in hydrothermal environments. Bonnie is particularly interested in improving the reliability of organic biosignature detections, and researching how to tell if something is a sign of life in very altered rocks. She is originally from Australia, where she did her PhD in Geology and Astrobiology at the University of New South Wales. She loves field work and has spent a lot of time in the bush, in the desert, and at sea thinking about life detection in the universe. One of Bonnie’s greatest passions is improving equity in geoscience, and she has worked on this topic with schools, museums, departments of education and in university setting. She is particularly passionate about the use of virtual field trips to help provide alternative support options to field work.