David Flannery

David Flannery in an astrobiologist at the Queensland University of Technology whose research focuses on the life and environments preserved in Earth’s early geological record. He is also a long-term planner for NASA’s Perseverance Rover mission, which is currently exploring similar environments on Mars, and collecting samples from Mars which will be returned to Earth. In 2014-2015, while a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), he studied molecular evidence for ancient microbial metabolisms preserved in Earth’s oldest known fossils, and worked on the development of scientific instrumentation that flew to Mars on NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover Mission.