Translational Biotechnology Hosted Seminar by Alfonso Davila from NASA
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The Search for a Second Genesis of Life in the Solar System
Alfonso Davila, PhD Wednesday, March 17, 2021 |
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Alfonso Davila is a research scientist in the Exobiology branch at NASA Ames Research Center https://www.nasa.gov/ames. His primary career goal is the search for evidence of life beyond Earth. He conducts theoretical and experimental research on the nature and distribution of life in terrestrial environments considered analogous to extraterrestrial environments of astrobiological interest. He has participated in multiple field campaigns in the Atacama Desert, the Antarctic continent and other extreme deserts. He seeks to understand the biological potential of those environments, and to use that knowledge to inform the search for evidence of life in other planetary bodies. Alfonso graduated in Marine Sciences from the University of Vigo (Spain) in 2001, and obtained a PhD in geophysics from the University of Munich (Germany) in 2005. He was a NASA postdoc fellow from 2006 to 2009 and later a researcher at the Carl Sagan Center (the SETI institute) between 2009-2017. He was hired as a research scientist at NASA in 2017. He is currently participating in the development of several mission concepts to search for evidence of life on Mars and on Enceladus.
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