'Life in Extreme Environments: the hyperarid Atacama Desert on Earth and Mars'

Dirk Schulze-Makuch received his Ph.D. in geosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Afterwards he took up a fellowship at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and later as Associate and Full Professor at Washington State University. In 2010, he was awarded the Friedrich-Wilhelm Bessel Award by the Humboldt Foundation for extraordinary achievements in theoretical biology.

Since 2013, he has been a faculty member at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany where he holds a professorship in planetary habitability and astrobiology, leading the Astrobiology Research Group. He is also Adjunct Professor at Washington State University and an Associate Member of SETI. Dirk has published more than 200 papers and 8 books in the field of planetary habitability and astrobiology, including the 3rd edition of Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints and The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds, first published in 2017.

Since 2016, Dirk has served as president of the German Astrobiological Society and as a council member of the European Astrobiology Network. He has been featured in scientific television documentaries, including on the National Geographic and Discovery Channel (USA), NHK-TV (Japan), ARD and RTL (Germany).his reseaech has been reported in media and news outlets such as Science, Popular Science, Discovery Magazine, New Scientist, World Science, Natural History Magazine, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, etc.

More information can be found on his website.

ERC Project - Habitability of Martian Environments: Exploring the Physiological and Environmental Limits of Life (HOME)